The Pre-baiting begins....

Tue 19th May 2009

I visited the Tench Lake again but unfortunatly blanked this time. All was not lost though as I started off a Pre-baiting campaign on a new peg Steve and myself will be fishing over a few sessions. The swim has a deep margin of 8 ft that gradually slopes up to about 5 or 6 ft by 30 yards out, after this it levels out to a bar of a couple of feet deep, before dropping off again on the other side at 40 yards plus.
I baited two spots, one with a cast to my left at around 75 deg near to some clumps of weed 30 yards out. The second spot in the near margin to my right just an under arm chuck away, near the bottom of the shelf in about 8ft of water.

The weather was cool with a strong southerly wind blowing straight in my face which caused a chop on the surface. There were no bites forthcoming for the first few hours and then only some liners later on. These I assume were fish moving across the swim at a point probably half way between me and the baited area, because the line coming from the feeder back to the rod would be well sunk until about that point I'm sure. I also recieved a liner on the margin rod, all of these coming during the last hour of daylight.

Darkness finally fell at around 9:30pm and I packed away a bit disappointed but never the less optimistic for the coming sessions on here. The recent cold spell of weather has possibly slowed down the feeding activity of the fish on the lake? I never saw any Tench rolling anywhere on the lake all session and only saw two fish splash, one of which was a Roach or Rudd. The other fish surfaced over the baited area in the margin and seemed quite large. I didn't see what it was and only heard it splash but I saw the large ring pools it left in its wake. It could quite well have been a Pike harassing some Roach or small Tench feeding on the bait I had thrown in? Usually when a large Bream or Tench rolls you don't hear any sound, it is more like a dolphin porpoising unless, like you sometimes witness with Tench and especially Carp, the fish breaches half out the water and splashes down onto their side.

I will also be baiting a gravel bar that I have located in another peg about 100 yards down the lake. At the moment I think the plan Steve and myself have made will be to concentrate on these two areas over the next few sessions, all depending on the results we get over the next couple of weeks.
Steve has already been out to continue with the baiting of this swim, and I will be out over the next day or two to start pre-baiting the gravel bar I found in the other peg.


Note: Sun 24th May Steve fished the same peg but blanked, he said he had fish bubbling on the gravel bar and saw Tench rolling there at dusk over the bait. He had nothing from the margin swim, however When I was there in the morning prebaiting the other gravel bar, we saw a (possible) Crucian jump over the bait at about 8:00am (hmmm...interesting). It looked a good fish at least 2lb +