At long last.

Due to awful weather conditions recently this was to be our first fish of the year and I couldn’t wait, and as we was unsure if the weather would hold we decided on Ashmoor lakes for the venue as its nice and close and we were guaranteed a fish.

I picked Steve up at a very late (for us) 7:30am and we headed for Ashmoor, I was wearing a LOT of clothing as it said it could be -3 real feel, so I had under crackers, thermal layer top and bottom, fleece lined trousers with wind proof over trousers, t-shirt, polo. Fleece and wind proof jacket, I looked huge.

Walking around to the swims was a little treacherous as it was quite flooded near the car park, but with a group effort we got to the swims. I had decided to bring a couple of methods to try but my main attack was going to be the flat bed feeder cast tight to the island using groundbait and a single Betalin soaked plastic maggot, the other method was to use a float set up in the margins

The weather was looking great for a few bites and I wasn’t sure if it was all the layers I was wearing but it didn’t seem that cold.

I put a little bait in the margins and a small ball of groundbait to the island and some specially trained stunt maggots too.

After casting in it didn’t take long to start getting bites, Roach and Bream mainly which was nice.

After a couple of hours the wind started to get up and was really biting and making it very hard to see the bites on the quiver so I reeled in and started float fishing.

The Bream had really got on the bait I had been trickling in the margins and were gong frantic, even for the time of year and how cold it was getting I couldn’t give them enough bait it was mad.

After a while longer we decided to call it a day as it was getting hard to hold the rod in the wind and with heavy rain on the horizon we retreated before getting a drenching.

As usual Ashmoor had come up trumps for us, as we always say its impossible to blank here which is why its our number 1 fishery.