Spring is erm................ starting to spring

 Well, that's been a long old drawn out winter. Since the rivers shut I have briefly wet a line on just one occasion and for just a few hours, although I have been busy with other fishy things and I am now pleased to announce that as of last week I am now trading as DAB Angling.

 This is only intended to be a small operation which I hope will bring in a bit of extra pocket money. As a lot of you know I make heavy duty feeders up to 6 ounce and I'm currently working on a small selection of species specific baits(barbel and tench for now) which should be on general sale by early next year once they have undergone lots more testing. We will have to see how things go but so long as I keep covering my costs there's plenty of scope to extend both the feeder and bait range.

 So, back to the fishing.
I arrived at my local tench water before 5am this morning, the reason for the early start is that it has all of a sudden become popular with the carp lads despite it been well known as a rock hard water and holding less that 20 original carp in 26 acres of water. Luckily I was first there and so dropped into one of my favoured swims.

 Even though it was a southerly wind it was blooming cold and the temp gauge on the car had been reading just 3 degree, with this in mind I held back on the bait and stuck to only feeding what my swim feeders could carry. I didn't even bother to have a few quick chucks at the start. The fish on this lake do like to give them self's away with the bream rolling and tench fizzing but all I saw all day was one smallish bream roll well out in the middle.

 At around 10.30am one of the alarms sounded and I picked up what was a rather subdued stop start take, the welcome culprit was a nice bream around 4lb. I had another take later when the bobbin juddered upwards before dropping to the floor like a brick and I connected with thin air although it's quite possible it could have been a liner and the fish had picked up the line with its fins. That was it for the day and I left a couple of other tench/bream anglers blanking around 1pm.

Ready to spring into action

 There was a definite warmth in the sun today that's not been felt for quite some time, and although I didn't expect much, if any action it was a glorious morning to be by the water at dawn even after I scraped the ice and over night sprinkling of snow off the car.

 I arrived at my target tench water for the coming months as the sun started to poke it's head up this morning with the intention of getting everything ready for the forth coming warm weather. Dawn is the best time to find the fish on here as they duly give them self's away with streams of bubbles, even with the cold there were a few, not many but the very odd small scattered patch of bubbles right where I expected the fish to be. However fishing was to come second today as I wanted to make good use of the quiet time by putting the marker float to good use.

 I had a quick walk around the lake a couple of weeks back and found the deeper areas in what is a rather shallow, very silty water. Now I knew where they were I wanted to make the most of them. I dropped into the first swim and thrashed the water until I was happy I had found a spot that I hoped the fish would like. I then got the rods out and cast my rigs to the marked spots and made notes of what to aim at on the far bank. They were then clipped up and marker knots tied on with light pole elastic. Numerous casts were made to the marker until I was 100% happy that the rigs would be bang on the money.

 Next up was the job of clipping up the spod rod, again I made plenty of casts Until I was happy that this was also spot on. The only draw back with this was that the small light weight spod falls a bit short of my furthest target when empty and the only thing to do was to put some bait in as it has holes top to bottom and with not having any kind of tape with me I couldn't fill it with water. Once happy that everything was spot on I moved onto the next swim that I fancy.

 To make things easier for me should I not be able to get in my first choice swim I intend to fish the same distance from which ever one I fish meaning I can leave all the rods clipped up and ready to on every trip. As look would have it one spot I have picked (that I fished a lot last season) falls half way between two swims meaning, subject to a friendly word and an OK from who ever jumps in my swim before me I should be able to fish the same spot from two swims. Another stroke of look is that the feature I'm fishing to is a long deeper channel that runs along 3 or 4 swims and once I had a good chuck about with the marker again I found that my clipped up rods could be fished on good areas in all of them.

 It was well after 9am by the time I got a bait in the water and as I wasn't expecting a great deal even before I had spent 2 hours chucking leads and rigs about I set about doing a bit of testing. Last year I fished the water with one standard heavy feeder rod outfit and a sleeper rod on an alarm. Looking back I don't think this was the best approach and with the size and power of the tench in there I have decided this year to fish both rods on alarms. I tried a couple of new rigs out to see how they cast and also to make sure they didn't tangle and I must say the Korum Helli rig kits work a treat.

 I have a lot of faith in imitation, fake, rubber call them what you like baits but really only used them along side naturals. This year I will be going a step further and using them exclusively on one rod at all times so, I tested a few of these out in the margins too. Corn stacks, mag aligners and my personal favourite so far, D-rigged fake casters. 3 of these tied to 8lb fluro carbon and a size 10 hook just look awesome fluttering down on to the lake bed ready to be hoovered up. And as some of you know, last year I started working on my own baits. Firstly came the ground bait that was responsible for double figure PB carp and barbel, now I have started to play around with one for the tench and today gave me the first opportunity to try it out.

 As expected I didn't catch but it was a rewarding day all the same, the sun felt great for once when the wind dropped. The water fowl were busy collecting material to build nests with and I just got a feeling that any time soon everything will just wake up and go mental trying to make up for lost time and I can't wait.