What lies beneath…..

College pool is an intriguing water, from its unfathomed and infeasible dark and deep depths, the draw of the huge variety of wildlife that inhabits this secluded area in this small Warwickshire village but for me and what keeps me coming back, is the weird and peculiar fish that turn up from time to time. I’ve caught finless perch, blind chub, barbel that appear fitter than their flowing water brothers and carp that pound for pound are easily the hardest scrapping fish I’ve ever had pull my line, I even caught a chunky newt on a bit of worm. Come winter time it’s largely deserted, ideal for an angler like me who seeks a bit of solitude.

I found out by accident when fishing for Big Perch on the marginal shelf or next to a feature such as an overhanging bush, provided largely unproductive. It’s not that I didn’t catch any Perch, I did, thousands of the little greedy gits, the pool is full of them but hardly any over a pound. My luck changed however when by chance I decided to cast in to the deepest part of the pool. By deep, God knows, most of the lake shelves off pretty quickly to 15ft of water, the middle, well, 20, 25, 30ft ? Cast a lead and feel the lead ‘donk’ on the bottom takes a long while indeed. Deep means cold so the fish are relatively slow growers, however the carp are bucking the trend and are putting on a bit of timber. A word of warning, use decent tackle if you fish for them, they are something else.

Deep water mean dark and gloomy and even in bright sunlight which tends to put the larger stripy’s off, it’s not an issue here. For them it’s saturnalia. Bait was air injected lobworm and liquid krill glugged King Prawn on simple running rig, my usual Zandavan roller over indicators for bite detection. It was a pretty windy day, so they make the ideal indicators; a bobbin would have been blown all over the shop.

A slow morning, a few aborted takes and then a fish that looked around a 1lb and 3/4's that took a liking to the fat lobworms. If I look back at my blog, the winter months is very slow here and late March seems to be a productive month. With Warwick ressi shut any ideas welcome for big Perch venues locally, please let me know.