Transient Towpath Trudging - Pt.43

With the locals rivers mostly in flood and completely out of sorts I stupidly decided to go up misfit alley for a fishing fix. Now waifs and stray roam the towpaths here but to be fair having put on to a chub swim by Martyn from the tackle shop that's the first swim I headed to.

I just knew looking at the water I shouldn't have bothered, but I had a zander rod with me as well, and lets be honest zander thrive in these conditions.

It was almost like someone had emptied a huge vat of condensed milk in to the canal, a colour I'd not seen before, well not that I can recall anyway.

You see I caught a cracking roach here as well which ended up going 1lb and 8 ounces on the scales so with bread with me and a few worms too, the plan was to visit that swim as well whilst I was waterside.

Canals for me as you know if you've been reading my blog for a while has always been about catching that double figure Zander, but with that done and dusted now, when roach like this exist locally I'm certainly going to target the small species in the closed season.

Some of the hybrids too, they go to a decent size so a 4lb roach bream hybrid is definitely one of the targets, as are some tench and rudd that exist on another bit of canal not a millions of miles away.

The chub bite came pretty quick last in the first swim where the fish "sit in the oxygenated water at the end of the overflow. That's particular quest was ticked up a little too easy really so I was disappointed when after a good hour in the swim nothing was doing whatsoever.

So I headed up to the area where I caught the roach with the zander rod tight to some cover and got the float out, initially bread on the hook which did the trick las time but then alternated to a more pungent worm from time to time. Some black roach groundbait and liquidised bread as feed again after an hour and there wasn't much doing at all.

A one point the heavens opened big time but I'm geared it for it these days, so not an issue but not exactly pleasant. So after twiddling my thumbs, and scratching ones head I headed back towards the car when I caught zander from in the past.

Well I say zander, these are some of the smallest zander I catch, almost like they go to the same nursery school. I thought at least here I'd get a bite !!! The float rod went out as usually there are bream here as well, but yep you guessed it, nada, zilch, nothing !!!

I could have gone somewhere else I suppose, but feeling a little demoralised I decided to head back home early (2 mins) and get on the tea and toast. 

On to the next one !!!