Yesterday I went back to the tench lake beside the M3 to try my hand for another big tench I had arranged to meet a friend of mine Chris Clark there who I fish with often.
I got there at 6am and chose a familliar swim, I put some ground bait in and set up a maggot feeder rod and a seventeen foot float road. Chris arrived about 9am and joined me in the same swim. It was oppresively hot and I didn’t get a bite all day but Chris foul hooked an eel that went straight into the weed. I showed him a little trick to dislodge fish from weed beds that has worked for me on occasions, I told him to tighten down on the fish and apply as much pressure as he dared. When he had done that and the fish was still immobile, I started to tap quite hard on his rod butt. After a few seconds the fish moved out of the weeds, this seems to work more often than not as I think the vibrations caused by banging on the butt irritate the fish into moving.
The eel was hooked in the tail and was returned to the water with due contempt but unharmed. I am a true conservationist but I still don’t like eels.
The rewards available from this water are worth the many blanks I seem to suffer.
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