Good results that aren't your own.

I'd been looking forward to getting out all week and on Saturday I had arranged to go fish a river with one of my fishing buddies Paul. The last few times he had fished the river he'd caught a good bag of pike and most quite size able, so obviously I was getting expectant of a good day. It had rained early on in the week and the rivers were up, so all last week I'd been checking the levels and towards the end of the week they were dropping nicely.

On arrival at the river we were disappointed to find the river high and flowing quite strong despite being clear. Normally I wouldn't mind extra depth if you have good clarity but in this case the downside was the strength of the flow. The lures would swing back round too fast to control them really and it was doubtful that many pike would come up into this flow. Our only option was to find areas of slacker water and hope that the pike were there.

We fished on anyway and for most of the day we were only rewarded with a couple of follows and a small jack all to Paul's savagear real eel. I was trying lots of different lures but nothing was getting any interest, Paul then kindly lent me an eel to try. We fished on for another few hours with not even so much as a follow, both feeling pretty knackered from all the walking, carrying gear and casting. We had a little bit of time left so headed back to the area we started at that had produced the follows.

Finally Paul was into a better fish after casting alongside the far bank trees, the pike must have seen it dropping just before it got dragged away in the flow. A good scrap followed as Paul had to fight the current as well as the fish but finally a good fish was netted, a nice mid double.

 

Time was now running out and it was going to be a case of a last minute fish if we were to catch anything else. Strangely this is exactly what happened as Paul was into another fish, this one looked of similar size in the water but the closer it came the bigger it looked, then when it was finally in the net we looked in and thought it was a fair bit bigger and really fat too. As we pondered on the size of it we both came to the conclusion that it could actually have been a twenty, sadly we both realised we had not got a pair of scales between us! why is that the case when you need to weigh a possible PB! Regardless of not knowing the weight we couldn't deny the fact that it was a lovely fish, all clean fins and hardly a mark on it. We also got good photos of it so Paul had the memory of the fish to look back on.

 

I didn't catch myself in the end and did feel a little disappointed but when your mates are catching such magnificent fish you have to pleased for them and that was a really good result to end off a really hard day.