First of the new year..

I had planned to fish a few new spots today with my mate Paul but things got off slowly when my old man phoned to say he was ill so wasn't coming for the kids straight away, that meant most of the new spots would have to wait and we only had time to fish one spot.

I wanted to fish drop shot again as Ive really been enjoying it recently and its proving to be 'the' method for this time of year, not only has it been putting more fish on the bank but its also attracted the attention of smaller perch too that you wouldn't always get when jigging soft plastics.
I was abit concerned for the presentation with the recent strong winds but today it was not bad at all, in fact the water was flat as glass.

The action started straight away with lots of small perch for both myself and Paul, i wanted to chop and change my lures to experiment with size, shape and also some lures that were scented.

 

 

Nothing seemed to make a noticeable difference as what ever i tried I was catching on. We set our target on 50 perch between us to make catching lots of small fish more interesting and fun. At first it didn't seem like we would get there but we started to get the odd flurry of fish when landing in a shoal and the total soon started to grow. Paul had a nice 2lb which was the best of the day and probably the only one over a pound but it was more about just catching fish of any size today, really for the cold water and time of year we were doing well and it was keeping us busy.

 

In the end we reached a tally of 62 perch between us with many fish dropped off along the way aswell. I caught a couple of unusual fish too which got me a little excited as i thought the stripeless perch below was a ruffe at first as it came into first view. Ive caught a few stripeless perch before but the last fish of the day was very unusual, it was almost patterned like a mackerel, it doesn't show up aswel in the photo as it did in reality but you can kind of make it out.

 

 

All in all a very satisfying day and I'm very much hooked on this drop shot lark now, i don't need more lures but i will be buying many more as drop shot lures specifically come in little packets that almost look like sweets and its this kind of thing that really gets us lure anglers going!

A nice steady start to the year and I'm in a good frame of mind while i wait for the rivers to get there backsides into shape!