Practice session

 Following my rather successful exploits on the Calder after a near 10 year break I have decide to sample a bit of local match fishing again, specifically on my local rivers. Only I don't do things by half's and have jumped in at the deep end and booked my self onto the lower Aire championships match in 3 weeks time! I thought I best get some practise in so today saw me heading to the River Aire at Beal.

 I knew the Aire to be deeper than the Calder but didn't bank on just how deep. I did a bit of enquiring mid week and readied some pole rigs to fish up to 40ft, yes that's right 40 foot deep in places! With an average depth of around 20ft. Trotting on a long rod is possible is a small number of pegs and the feeder will catch on any and no doubt provide the top weights with bream and skimmers making these up. The feeder and float rod is no problem but what I needed to work out was how the hell I was going to pole fish in such a depth of water.

 It would seem as I was given some duff info as my first peg that had been suggested to me turned out to be just a few feet deep with little if any flow, so after a couple of hours of catching fish on only the feeder I decided that I wasn't going to learn anything and opted for a move down stream. I got settled into the new peg and plumbed up to find around 16ft of water and a nice steady flow in front of me. However one thing I didn't bank on was the undulating river bed, along the length of my peg it was up and down by as much as 12in making running any sort of rig through with the flow impossible unless I fished well off bottom. (I'm now told this is common on a lot of the river)

 I rigged up with a 2 gram pole float and cupped in 3 balls of Van Den Eynde world champion with a few maggots, casters and chopped worms added, I slipped on a single maggot and lowered the rig in. First run through and the float dipped under and the first roach of around 3oz went in the net. I started to get into a rhythm then and fish were coming regularly before it went quiet, another ball of groundbait saw the fish return before moving off again in search of more food. That's another issue that I need to resolve as loose feeding in that depth is out of the question. I did put another ball in and caught some more fish including a couple of nice bonus perch knocking on for 12oz on sections of worm before calling it a day after around 3 hours with the onset of a heavy thunder storm, again!