A Well Deserved Fish.

After a very stressful day at work and now with 9 days off I decided to pop to Ashmoor for an evening's surface fishing with Steve in toe.

I wasn't going to bother to be honest as I was knackered by the time I got home about 6:30pm and was wondering if there was going to be enough time for a fish, but I shouldn't of worried.

We pulled into the car park about 7pm and had the lakes to ourselves, which was nice, tackle could not have been more simple, Barbel rod, medium sized freespool reel and a size 12 hook baited with a bit of crust, no floats or shot etc, simple fishing, just how I like it.

As time was limited we walked around the lakes baiting all the areas we know to produce, after the lap it was time to grab the gear and find some fish, which took about 10 seconds and I had a Mirror on, only a couple of pounds but any fish after the day I've had was very welcome.

The bites came steadily throughout the couple of hours fishing, I had so many I lost count after 10.

As usual Ashmoor provided some cracking sport with Carp to over 8lbish and an unbeatable way to relieve stress.

And with a few days off hopefully I can get a few more days down here as its always been a home from home and the fact its owned by my good friend Steve's Grandparents makes it just perfect.

You can't get better.

This month we decided to fish Ashmoor lakes, mainly because we was unsure on the weather so decided to keep close to home, plus we love this fishery.

I picked Steve up at 6:45 and arrived at Ashmoor around 7am.

We grabbed our gear and headed around the ponds for a look. Fo

r a change we headed to the far side of lake 2. I had a Barbel rod set-up for Carp and a flat bed feeder on a quiver rod for everything else. I was experimenting with my Carp set-up and had 6 solid PVA bags on leaders ready made to tie on and try, first was a bloodworm dumbbell tipped with flouro corn packed with 1-4mm pellet. This was placed in the corner along the bank, and before I had even sorted the next rod it was away, a lovely Mirror was my prize of a few pound, great start. Next I put out a peperami dumbbell tipped with pink corn, again in PVA bag put in the same place. This time I even got round to sorting the other rod then it screamed off, and another Carp was in the net. I put a pineapple pop up out next and carried on with my feeder fishing, which was disturbed yet again by the alarm with another Carp. With this I put the Barbel “sleeper” rod out the way so I can concentrate on my feeder fishing.

After a couple of Bream and a small Carp it slowed up, so we moved back to our old favourite swims the other side of the lake, I feeder fished the island in front of me and had my sleeper rod fishing with the yellow pop up in the edge. I was catching well with many Carp and Bream but started to slow. I swapped my feeder rod for float rod and started fishing in the edge with instant success, adding Perch and Barbel to the tally of fish. The sun was now well up and it was surprisingly really warm for March, so I shallowed up and started Rudd fishing, I have no idea how many I caught but it was a lot with the odd Bream and Hybrid.

There was a few Carp cruising about on the surface so I decided to have a wonder around and found a few fish in lake 1 around the pipe, there was two younger anglers fishing lake 1 in the far corner but they had no luck, and after catching 5 off the top I did wonder why they was not following suit.

I returned to my swim to finish the day float fishing and catching a few more.

As usual we end the day with a shed load of fish and wondering why people fish anywhere else, and the fact there was 5 other people fishing which only one other angler caught a couple of fish, what they do is just mind boggling.