Seeing as it is the Easter holidays, Merlin and I decided to go to Wylands for a three day, two night session on New Speci as a continuation of the quest for a 20lb fish from that lake. We got there at about 9 am on Monday morning, and as soon as we got out of the car, we saw that the lake was very busy. We went for a walk round the lake with a bait bucket each so that we could claim our swims and prevent anyone else from taking them. Luckily my swim at the far end was free, but there was someone doing a day session in Merlin's swim (which is to the left of mine). This meant that he would either have to fish in a different swim for a bit, or he could go and do some stalking on Old Speci. He chose the latter as the sun was starting to come out and the forecast was for a very sunny day.
We proceeded to ferry all our gear to our end of the lake, which is about a five minute walk each way when carrying gear. Luckily, someone lent us their barrow which made the carrying a lot easier! When Merlin has passed his driving test and we have two cars, a barrow is the first thing we're going to buy! I then set up my pod and rods, and cast out, fishing in my usual spot under a tree close in to the island, but my right hand rod was slightly displaced as there was someone to the right of me. I then set up all my overnight stuff starting with the bivvy. To my utter dismay, it was filled with water! I remembered that I had last used it as a shelter on a day session when it had been raining, and so it was still wet when I packed it away, meaning some water had got inside. The sun soon dried it out, and I will clean the mud out at some point in the future.
At 1:30 pm, the right hand rod went off, and I struck into a decent fish. It put up a good fight, probably because it hasn't been caught all winter. When we had unhooked and weighed it, it was 9lb 6oz, and was a really pretty common. Most of the fish in New Speci are commons, but I don't know why. I'd prefer there to be a few more mirrors, but you can't have everything!
The afternoon was very quiet, I spent most of the time inside my bivvy, either watching the water (unfortunately there wasn't much to see) or reading. I had taken the GoPro camera so that I could film fish being netted, and for the fish I caught, it worked quite well. I need to figure out how to use it to look at the bottom, and maybe catch some fish feeding, but hopefully I'll find a website somewhere telling me how to do this.
In the early evening, just as it got dark at around 7:30, I made myself some supper. I had some rather delicious Tesco Jalapeño burgers with cheese, no ketchup. It really is important to keep the food going in when you're on the bank especially in the cold weather we've got at the moment. On another note it's lovely that it now stays light so late, you can just get a lot more done every day and it's really helpful when fishing. I then went to bed quite soon to keep warm, and I was woken in the morning by Merlin, who had some fish he wanted filmed and photographed.
In all honesty, there is nothing I can say about the second day except the conditions were almost identical to the first day albeit with a little less pressure on the lake. I think I didn't catch anything because of the wind pushing into my swim, all the fish were behind the island in shelter.
So, here's a nice picture to make this a little more interesting!
On the last day, Merlin and I moved over to the left hand bank of New Speci, so that we could cast to some slack water off the bank of the island. This brought some success for Merlin, who caught a few nice fish, including the biggest of the session, relegating mine to second place. I hooked one, which took me straight into a snag. I didn't get to the rod in time because I had just picked up Merlin's rod after a fish did exactly the same to him just 30 seconds prior to my run. The loss of this fish greatly annoyed me, and I finished the session on a slightly sour note, but not as sour as for Merlin!
That is because on the Wednesday morning, while throwing some boilies out over his swim, his camera flew out of his coat pocket, and rolled into the lake! As you can expect from treatment such as this, it is now broken. Luckily he managed to retrieve it and recover the footage from the SD card (or "slavage" it, as he put in his video - you really must check your videos and descriptions for typos in the future Merlin!)
So to end, the session wasn't as fruitful as I might have hoped for, but hopefully we'll be able to get down for a day next week, when the fish are perhaps a little more willing to eat my nice hooks. Talking of which, I really must restock my tackle, as Merlin used most of it by catching trees!
