Opening day

It has been a long time since I've had the opportunity to fish opening day so I took advantage and set the alarm for half past three with the aim of being on the bank by first light. I decided to fish the stick float for dace and roach but use heavy enough tackle to land a bonus chub or two if they came along. As I approached the river it was obvious that no one had been down during the closed season as the path I needed to take was 6ft overgrown, as was the riverbank. I spent around half an hour clearing a path and enough space on the bank.

The path to the the river bank 

I spent a while sorting out my rig, running the float through the stretch finding the weed beds and by a quarter to six I was fishing. After a couple of missed bites and a couple of adjustments to the rig I caught a small roach, the first fish of the new season.

1st of the season from the river

I was steadily building the swim and had another 3 or 4 similar sized roach in the net when I noticed a pike eyeing up the keepnet, however it quickly spooked and swam off. After I had a couple more fish in the net the pike was back and it looked a very good size, again it spooked and I went back to rebuilding my swim. Each time the pike came it took around 20 to 30 minutes to get a bite again and over the next few hours I had 4 roach snatched as I was bringing them in.

Towards the end of the session the large pike returned and was lurking around the net again, the pike was almost 3 sections of the net long, around 40 " and was most probably a twenty. I had a lure rod with me and I tried every lure I had but the pike didn't show any interest in them, at times I was lifting a shad 2" from its mouth but it never reacted.

I made a single treble trace by removing a treble from a lure and attaching it to the quick clip on the lure trace, took a 4oz roach from the net and free lined the roach in the margin, suddenly the bait started panicking and the pike appeared from the mid river depths and nailed it first time! I would love to be able to continue the story and post a picture of a new pb and a first twenty pounder however after 10 seconds of fight the pike found a patch of streamer weed and managed to free itself!

The result of a pleasing day fishing the stick

Even with the disappointment of losing that big pike I thoroughly enjoyed the day, I ended up with around 30 fish mainly roach plus a few chublets, a couple of perch and a solitary dace. I will be heading back to this stretch at some point this season with a bucket of 'fresh' roach with one target in mind........