Estate lake tench - playing bridesmaid

Tuesday the 5th and Thursday the 7th of June


With it being the Jubilee bank holiday I did have it in mind to get back down to the estate lake for some tenching  but the previous weeks weather had left me in a right old mess with work, my best concession was to go like the clappers on Tuesday and try to get down mid afternoon, which I did.

With a few anglers on, obviously trying to catch up on lost time after the ticket debacle, I ended up plonking down in an area known as the lawn, or goose green, Phil Smith was once again in the next swim and had had a few bites so it looked a reasonable bet. The thing is with these fish is that they can be very much all or nothing, you hit on to a group of fish or you just pick up stragglers and that pretty much summed my session up apart from one feisty male. I believe Phil finished up with eight fish with baits probably no more than twenty yards from mine.

The weather forcast for Thursday was atrocious, rain all day and plenty of the particularly wet variety too! An executive decision was made to not even contemplate work and so Wednesday saw me picking up a few pints of maggot ready for an early start.

Leo had booked the week off work and we arranged for me to meet him at his house before travelling over in convoy. On entering the estate no anglers were in sight and with goose green having been fairly consistent recently we plumped for that spot. As usual out came a coin and Leo, being a better tosser than me, won yet again and chose to fish the right hand peg, where Phil fished on Tuesday, there you go, excuse primed and ready!

To cut a long story short I got a bit of a drubbing, Leo ended up with fourteen bream and nine tench for I would guess 140lb+ of fish, I had one bream and two tench. However as I pointed out to Leo any idiot can catch loads of fish but it takes quality to wangle out the big ones and I had managed to scrape the specimen of the day at 7lb 10oz's.

7lb 10, quality counts!

The weather really was pretty ropey and I was constantly called out from under my shelter to help Leo out as his second rod would be away while he played a fish.

Leo gets wet as I watch, seconds later I saw the line on that second rod drop back and had to go and lend a hand

It's strange how often two takes at once occur on this lake, sometimes to anglers fishing well apart, but in this case they stayed well and truly in front of Leo and he fished well to make the most of it. I had to be content with feeding our latest resident bankside maggot muncher, a female chaffinch who's tameness has to be seen to be believed.

At least something likes them