Jammed on a cold dark night.

Fri 3rd October 2008

Started this weeks trip to the Dove, by being caught in a traffic jam on the A38 for over an hour!
To rub salt in the wound I was only 1/2 a mile from the turn off for Rolleston when I joined the que. This obviously set me back a bit as it was fully dark while I was still waiting in the jam. I didn't let that stop me fishing though and still made it down to the river, and had cast my bait in by 8:00pm.

I was fishing a known Barbel holding swim, casting to a bush on the opposite bank. There was no visible moon again this week which made it very dark, so I had to try to cast towards the bush using my head torch which made thing difficult to judge accurately. With the river being up a slight bit and pushing through, this made keeping the feeder in position a bit difficult. After 3 or 4 casts leaving each one in for at least 20 mins, I decided to move down to another peg where I could swing the bait out near my own bank. This time I had only made 2 casts before deciding to pack up as the temperatures had plummeted and I had not received the merest hint of a bite all evening ( which was unusual). The weather report had said temperatures would be down to 5 deg C overnight which is quite a drop from 18 the previous week.

I would like to have checked the water temp with my digital thermometer but unfortunately I had forgotten to test the batteries, and they were dead, so I don't know if the water was as cold as the air temp yet or not. I felt my tactics and casting were ok, just that the fish were not interested probably due to this northerly weather that had been set in for the past 48 hours, making the conditions decidedly wintry.
If this had lowered the water temp it would explain why bites were non existent. It's never a good time to be fishing for Barbel just as temp levels are falling rapidly into a cold snap. By the light of my head torch the grass even appeared to be frosting over on the bank and it had taken on that distinct white and slightly crunchy texture as I walked along from the first to the second peg.

So it was back to the blanking again for this session, hopefully this will only be a minor set back caused more by conditions rather than my technique ? time will tell I suppose.