For the second consecutive morning, I was up with the sparrows, or perhaps even before them, with high hopes of a big tench. There would be no company on the bank today, so I made my way to Exeter alone at the rarely seen time of 4am. I got to the canal just as the sun was peeping over the horizon and a cold mist was hovering and swirling above the surface.
I had raked and prebaited a swim heavily last night on the way home from Rackerhayes, so I was somewhat expectant when I got there this morning and could make out quite a number of bubbles over my baited area. I have prebaited only once before on Exeter Canal. After my mate Jason had 11 bream, we threw in our leftover bait and I came back the next morning to find the same swim infested by eels. One big skimmer and a 4lb tench on the tip was as good as that session got.
It's funny really, I recall a trip to the Royal Military Canal in Kent with my dad, when I was in my early teens. I had around 8-10lb of lovely roach on pinkie, fishing right at the very end of the canal, near to the sea at Hythe, yet I was extremely jealous of my dad who had caught two tiny eels in his mixed catch, fishing five metres or so out next to a weedbed. At the time I had caught only a handful of eels, so they would have been quite enthusiastically greeted should they succumb to my own baits, whereas now, I don't believe that any pleasure angler could possibly enjoy catching bootlace eels.
If that tale sounds ominous, then that's because it is. I commenced fishing at about 5.15am and by seven o'clock I had landed no fewer than seven eels between six ounces and a pound, which is an unwanted personal best aggregate from the Exeter Canal, or any other canal come to think of it. I lost a couple of hooks, but upping the hook size from a 16 to a 14 did help overcome this. I hate catching small eels, but I also really dislike the thought of leaving a hook in one.
It was the fourth of these eels that provided the highlight of the session, seeing as whilst I was shipping back, it became stuck solid and I assumed that it had wrapped itself up in a weedbed, and these can be very, very dense. It was only when I realised that it was slowly moving that I twigged that a pike had grabbed it. I wasn't expecting the episode to last very long, as an eel strikes me as a difficult and fragile thing to hold across a jaw of razor sharp teeth (sounds gruesome, and I really wasn't looking forward to half an eel suddenly flying out of the water at me). Also the chances of the hook transferring from eel to pike seemed minute, given the former's penchant for swallowing the bait.
The pike hung on for a good few moments before hitting the surface, where I could see a definite canal best pike, were I to land it, and possibly even a pike to challenge my overall personal best of over seventeen pounds. As soon as its eyes poked above the waters surface however, it was gone. Unbelievably I retrieved the eel in relatively good shape, with only a single puncture mark in its flank, and even that quite insignificant.
After the pike debacle, and three more poxy eels, I caught my first skimmer bream - a fish of around three ounces. I went on to catch eight more of these, all sort of three to six ounces, which is promising to see, but if ounces were pounds it might've been a session more along the lines of what I had hoped. The same number of rudd also obliged, and three more skimmers fell off, but there were no signs of that bonus tench or bream anywhere. Worth noting also is that most of the skimmer bites registered as lifts and all but one (to half a worm) were taken on triple maggot.
There was some splashing around in the reeds opposite, on and off, for most of the morning, which sounded like small roach, and given the absence of any of those in my catch today, I would suspect that they are spawning. There was another angler fishing about a hundred yards to my right. He had also raked and prebaited but had not had anything other than roach and rudd when I left him to start packing away at 10.
So my two days off to go fishing gave mixed results. Perhaps I did a few things wrong yesterday, but I think that the lack of action today can mostly be put down to very bright and warm conditions which have followed a prolonged period of what most people would consider pretty awful weather but many anglers know to be ideal conditions for catching through the spring and summer months. Despite some frustrating fishing, there really is something about being by the bank in the early hours. I can only describe it as being good for the soul.
Finally, my apologies to anyone who has noticed the big silver bream post appear a couple of times and then disappear. I have been having some internet trouble, which I blame for the first instance, and then removed the second because I read it and thought it was bloody terrible! I'm no writer, but I do try to put something interesting in every now and again, for my own as well as anyone else's future reference. So I'll be rewriting it and then posting under the date of the trip - as this blog is my diary first and foremost - so it won't appear at the top of the blog. However, any avid followers of Tales From The Towpath can now subscribe (on the right hand side) to get email updates whenever a new post appears.