Blankety Blank

The "beginners luck" appears to have worn off! 2 more after work sessions have both resulted in blanks. The first on July 2nd we struggled to find any signs of fish in lake 3 in areas that weren't already being fished (virtually all the fish were at the top of the lake) so we tried our luck at stalking one off the top on Lake 2 but the fish weren't interested. As the sun went down we moved down to the dam end and put a couple of bottom baits out, 1 in the relatively weed free margins and the other out in the middle which also felt somewhat clear but turned out to be covered in pretty manky rotting leaf matter. Had a few liners from a couple of fish cruising around near the margins but ran out of time before anything got it's head down.

Blanking in fish soup!

On July 5th the lakes were much quieter, and many of the scaly residents of lake 3 were at the dam end, with the 2 or 3 anglers already on the lake fishing at the top end, so things looked promising! I tried floater fishing for around an hour but the fish that were taking off the top drifted off to the right into Steve's swim. There were still plenty cruising between the reeds on my left and the open water to my right though, so I made up a zig to fish about 2ft below the surface and lobbed it out roughly 1/3 across the lake where the fish seemed to be cruising around more frequently and plopped a critically balanced wafter rig in the corner to my left. The zig rod went bowstring tight to the tune of a few beeps about half an hour later, but only resulted in a bow wave racing across the lake when I picked the rod up. I'm thinking a fish had just swam into the zig rather than taken it and ejected it, but who knows.

The area around the margin rod which I'd baited with a couple of handfuls of boilie started fizzing up as the light was fading and I was sure it would rattle off any minute, but after half an hour or so later the fizzing had stopped without so much as a liner. I did see a small tench swim past in the margins earlier on so maybe he was one of the culprits, or maybe my presentation wasn't up to scratch. The rig came in weed free when I packed up so I don't think it was buried in the weed at least.

It's all a bit of a learning curve as I'm not used to fishing lakes this weedy with hardly any obvious clear spots, and I haven't built up much confidence in zig fishing yet but it's all good fun. I'm off to Anglers Paradise for the annual holiday in a weeks time so not sure I'll get another session in before then, but when I get back I'll hopefully be able to start doing some overnighters as my current bivvy is a bit big for most of the pegs so I plan on getting a much smaller one once I know how much money Zyg magically evaporates out of my wallet while at AP!