A Learning Curve

A morning session at Ryton Pools today, our first visit to this very attractive little lake.
Having read up on the venue via a couple of excellent blogs on this site and archive newsletters on the LAA site, we armed ourselves with just sweetcorn and bread for this trip. Both of us opted to floatfish and settled in swims on the roadside bank, mine being opposite the top end of the island and Dad fished at the entrance to the roadside bay.
It wasn't very long before dad was into a tench, the first of four caught at intervals throughout the morning with each weighing between 4 and 5 pounds, they were all caught on corn fished at about one and a half rodlengths.
My own morning hadn't gone so swimmingly despite fishing in very much the same way, admittedly in very slightly deeper water, I had only a couple of tentative bites to show for my efforts. The one thing I did differently to my dad was to introduce groundbait so maybe this had proved my downfall, it certainly seems to me from observations of bubbling fish in both swims on the day that this will be a water where ambushing patrolling fish is the productive method rather than encouraging competitive feeding through building a swim. Therefore next time I will adopt a much more conservative feeding strategy.

Early April 2009

I spent much of my childhood fishing venues close to my Coventry home, along with various school friends we travelled mainly by bus to places such as Somers Fishery at Packington in search of Tench and Skimmer Bream, Coombe Pool dreaming of Bream the size of dustbin lids or the Avon at Ryton Bridge hoping to fool the Chub with lumps of cheese. Greater skill and ambition borne out of mini triumps and major disapointments along the way led me to try my hand at club match fishing alongside my dad with varying degrees of success and a weekly Sunday outing with a good friend from senior school, Phil and I hardly missed a Sunday throughout our schooling. We ventured further afield with the help from lifts from our parents taking in fisheries such as the river Blythe, Napton Resevoir and the river Leam. However, In 1987 my angling career came to an abrupt halt as I moved away from Coventry and everything I had previously known in order to pursue a career in Fish Farming and Fishery Management in the South.

Now, having moved back to the Coventry area after some 20 odd years, I decided on joining the Leamington AA for some good quality local fishing with my dad. Having never seen or fished the Leamington waters before it should prove an interesting venture for us both.

We fished Jubilee pools twice in early april with very poor returns, my dad and I both had a Bream of about 4lb each on our first attempt. We fished feeder tactics with caster just over the ledge into deeper water from two pegs at the car park end of the smaller pool, despite both of us catching the fishing was poor, probably down to low water temperatures. On our second visit we walked to the far end of Horseshoe and floatfished caster but were frustrated by unhittable bites all afternoon, I finally managed to catch a single roach of about 6oz. We will have to reconsider our tactics for Jubilee in future and will probably wait for some warmer weather as there is probably potential to catch fish up in the water.