I always see March as the beginning of spring (the Met Office tell us the same too), so it's about typical that after a pretty settled week with a few milder days I wake up on Sunday morning to find a sharp frost and that it's -2 degrees outside!
Walking around the lake there was no signs of life - normally a sign that the open water is the area to draw as opposed to an island peg. Most of the island pegs were gone when my hand went in, apart from 53 that is - and that's what had came out when I looked in my hand!
Long term readers will know I have a love/hate relationship with the peg, and it's more of the latter on the whole. It's really a summer peg, but it does occasionally fish in the cooler months during mild spells as it's shallow. I guess the morning of a sharp frost isn't the time to draw it.
Still, with a task still to do I set up three rigs - one for the long margin to my right at 12m in 3ft of water, one for 8m down the track in 4.5ft of water, and one for just under 3ft of water pretty tight to the far bank at 13m. The floats were Preston Chianti's on the deeper lines (a 4x12 and a 4x14) with a small Preston PB2 for across where I planned to search the peg with punch. All the rigs had .125 hook-links, with size 16 hooks for the near and far rigs, and an 18 for the track. All the rigs were matched up to Preston 11h elastic.
On the whistle I fed a tiny pinch of bait down the track (hemp and corn) before starting across on punch. I decided to leave the margin to my right until later - there was quite a high attendance but I had a lot of space here where the corner is. I hoped by leaving it quiet a few fish may move here out of the way. Optimism, eh!
The peg to my left had a carp pretty much strait away (their only fish), where as I could only get the occasional knock on the punch before I managed to get of the mark with a tiny roach of less than 1oz. How the hell do they take a 9mm bread punch? I tried a small bit of corn on the deck across and had a proper dig on it almost strait away but missed it. I never had another bite across all day after that!
I chopped about trying to get a bite on corn or punch, both across (where I'd started to drip odd bit's of feed too) and down the track but it wasn't happening. On the half way mark in the match I tried down the edge, hoping against hope really. I managed two small roach there, one on a tiny piece of corn and one on a caster which I hadn't even fed there.
With two hours to go I decided that it wasn't going to happen with carp so I started feeding odd caster on the 8m line with the intention of catching a few roach. It wasn't a winter league match but I figured it was better to get a few bites and at least have something to keep me interested - there was no football on until 4pm to listen too!
Initially, the roach were tiny and I was missing a lot of bites. Even with the dotted down float I had to watch it after it went under and wait until it moved sideways - if it went under out of sight nothing was there when I lifted! The fish were all under an ounce for the first hour, and I had to keep changing the depth to even get regular bites. I had odd quiet spells which I hoped were carp, but none materialised, and feeding a small pinch of hemp again bought the roach back.
In the last hour I found it was better to feed a reasonable pinch of hemp with six casters in an fish it out rather than drip odd casters in. The average size of fish got to an ounce, with an odd two ounce fish thrown in too. I was getting less bites than I started with, but was hitting more of them. Fishing away from the feed slightly helped too. I finished the match with about thirty-five roach which went 2lb 8oz on the scales for absolutely nowhere, but I actually quite enjoyed it! I wish I'd tried it earlier to see if the size of roach carried on increasing - they are in there.
I wish I'd got of my box and set up a lighter roach rig - I've put a top in my holdall with a soft single no8 elastic in (not ideal for small roach, but a lot better than the 11h I was using, and would still give me a chance with a carp in the cold). Hopefully it doesn't come to that for next weeks winter league with the weeks weather looking quite promising. The lake on the whole fished hard with just 30lb winning and two 18lb weights making the frame - weights taken from in the open water. Come on spring, get rolling in!
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