In an effort to clear space, over the past week I have been removing leftover groundbait from the freezer and depositing it in a swim on the Grand Western Canal after work. I think I did this on three occasions before eventually casting a line. To be totally honest, I have never really found prebaiting all that successful. Perhaps when I have tried it I haven't fed enough, or perhaps even too much. Maybe the GWC is just too small and shallow for it to really work, and my only attempt on the Exeter Canal (2012) seemed to attract every bootlace eel in the cut.
Nevertheless, a little roach promptly followed the very first cast of a small waggler on Thursday evening, over my prebaited pitch. This was quickly followed by another, and then a skimmer bream. I did then lose a decent skimmer, before catching a few more smaller ones and a couple of chunky rudd. These were all taken just over the near shelf before an eruption of bubbles had me casting towards the far bank, this time after baiting up with a piece of corn. Wary of foul-hooking anything I ignored a positive lift, which I now wish I'd struck, seeing as the activity soon subsided and my only fish from this line were a one ounce hybrid and a perch, which threw itself at a piece of corn as I sunk the line between float and rod tip.
The sunbleak, aka 'motherless minnows', are out in force again after disappearing for the winter, and they really are a pain, totally spoiling any efforts to fish delicately for roach in the warmer months. It is just impossible to feed them off, prompting the use of bigger baits and bulkier rigs. The small pike of this canal go absolutely nuts for them, however.
In any case, it was skimmers and bream I was after, and so I made a switch to the basin for the last half an hour of the day, most of which was spent trying to escape the attentions of a rather persistent swan...
A swingable hybrid was not long in coming on double red maggot, before a healthy bend in the rod only five minutes later saw me attached to - you guessed it - a jack pike. Quite why it would choose to eat a couple of maggots over the many thousand sunbleak occupying the swim I don't know. It bit me off at the landing net anyway, which was my cue to go home and have dinner.
I had another go on Saturday evening but the prebaited swim was a dead loss after an early skimmer. Fishing for as long as I could see the tip of my Drennan Glo-tip Antenna float in Tidcombe bay was good fun though. Fish came in fits and starts but I had good variety. I had roach, rudd to 12oz, a nice hybrid and several more skimmers, all on maggot. It was simple, unpredictable canal fishing, which is what draws me these venues time and time again.