Grinds to a halt

I don't know what happened and when but the fishing this year just totally grinded to a stop. Sure fish still get caught but a few weeks ago it felt like options were still numerous and everything you tried seemed to work. Then it rained typically on a Friday and then we've been waiting for the rivers to settle after going up and down but not quite reaching good conditions. You know in the middle of winter it is always going to be tough but it seemed to come all of a sudden this year.

 I've not been able to get out that much recently and to be honest Ive not been too bothered, Ive been busy with a few things I'm working on which I'll talk about when finished and that's kept my hunger for going fishing at bay.
 The few times Ive been out it made sense to dust off the drop shot gear and prove to myself that in tough times it really does hammer anything else. I caught ok numbers wise but nothing big, although i did have some nice ones in size, colour and condition. Catching big ones isn't what its all about though in winter, its just about ticking over and carrying on catching when conditions are tough. I actually caught a couple of pike on the drop shot gear too which was unexpected given that Ive fished this venue in numerous spots literally hundreds of times and only ever had one single pike in 4-5 years.

The last photo below shows my tally from a couple of hours today, i thought it would be a bit of fun using one of those click counters to see how many i caught, recently seeing them being used on the 'perch pro' episodes on Kanal Gratis. Its not anything serious, just another thing to introduce to my own fishing to make it a little more interesting and fun. The counter was only £1.39 off ebay so was worth it just to give it a go.