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.