A bit of history, Arrow Valley is where my grandad took me fishing for the very first time and got me the bug, and i've visited it ever since. its where i made the transition from pleasure fishing to match fishing as its where the Redditch Kingfishers practised as a group every week.
Its a council run venue and is very rarely match fished. its a big piece of water at 30 acres but has a couple of islands at one with depths from 5 to 10ft in places and is stuffed with fish, with roach to 2lb, bream to 8lb and carp to 20lb. it really is a place where you could practise pretty much any method you like, from punch on the pole to meat on the method. and its fished its nuts off this year so far!
So a friday afternoon session it was to be. With a weekend in London planned, i didnt want to spent much money, so i emptied all my bits of groundbait from the cupboard into a bowl (about 2kg, perfect) soaked a couple of pints of Cob House micros and bought a pint of red maggots, total bait cost, £2.40! also any clubs affiliated to the Redditch federation of anglers can fish Arrowvalley for free and my works club is affiliated so a free ticket, brilliant!
11am rolled round and itchy feet saw me taking a little flyer from work and i was parked up and trolley loaded by 20 past!! i was purley going to target carp and more specifically bream so i packed a couple of tip rods and my landing net handle in my ready rod bag and took my pole bits out of my net bag and was off. i'd parked by the sailing club and had a stroll along the long straight Shakespeare bank (which has been recently re-pegged with some excellent staging) and settled on a flyer at the end of the island. a decent 70 yard chuck got to a small bay on the end of the island with deeper water 5-10 meters off the island. i fancied the deeper water as the temperatures had dropped recently.
Tackle for the day was simple: -
Rod 1 - Middy X-Flex medium feeder, Daiwa Capricorn 3500XTC, 0.22 maver genesis mainline with a 25g Kobra method feeder clipped on the end.
Rod 2 - maver powerlite feeder system @12ft, Daiwa Excellet Plus, 6lb Sensor with a rocket feeder paternoster to 0.16 hooklength.
Both rods were clipped up in the deeper water off the island. The Powerlite Feeder System rods never fail to amaze me as i was chucking the rocket the 70 yards accurately every time but the playing action is superb and i never pulled out of a fish all day with it! It was prob near the maximum range the 12ft rod would give me, but the 13ft section would put another 20 yards on the chuck! the Middy rod is fairly new in my bag, and has more backbone on the cast and the 70 yards was easy for it, even with the softest tip in. it has great big rings which help the cast and big spool diameter on the reel made the session really easy!
By 12.30 i was ready to go, groundbait was good, rods clipped and i was comfortable. I swapped the method for a big rocket and put 10 chucks of gb over my line with just a few reds in to kick start the session. i was intending to chuck the method very regularly and by the time i'd got the spare method feeder loaded and ready i'd reel in and re-chuck. with triple dead red on the hook, 4th cast and a nice pull round saw bream number 1 in the sack and at 3lb was a nice start even though i know they go a lot bigger as they've packed weight on over the last couple of seasons! a few more chucks with only a few signs gave me the feeling they wern't massively confident and the drop in temperature had calmed them down so i swapped over to the feeder set up.
I used a new set-up for me this time after reading Darren cox's recent article on long range feeder fishing. i started by tying a long 12" twisted loop and attaching a snap link to the end. then, slight variation to Darrens setup, tied a second 1/2" loop above the main loop. i then tied a 5" twisted loop in the end of my 3ft hooklength and then looped the hooklength inside the smaller loop in the mainline! (i hope that made sense). this set up gave me a nice paternoster with the twisted loop in the hooklength keeping the hooklength away from the mainline and tangle free! (i would like to incorporate a swivel somehow to remove any possiblility of line twist, but top and tailing my double maggot hookbait didnt actually cause any problems)
First cast o nthe feeder and bream number 2 was in the net and i was becoming a very happy man. by introducing just a few reds in my mix i was keeping things interesting and by 2 o'clock had 5 bream in the net along with a sole perch.
I was having trouble with Grebe's diving in my peg which would disturb the feeding shoal for 20 minutes or more, but a few well placed casts when they were on the surface got rid if them pretty quickly (no grebes were harmed during the writing of this blog)
My mate John watson turned up for a look and with him on my box for half an hour the peg was screwed and he didnt have a bite (cheers mate) but he did kindly take a photo of my net when he left with 8 bream for 30lb in it.
By now it was 3pm and with an hour left on the clock i got my head down on the feeder and started chcucking every 3-4 minutes to get some more feed in after the last Grebe attack and get the bream back. it worked nicely and 5 more bream in the last hour brought the session to a nice end. i reckon i had around 45lb in total with a couple of the bream easily 5lb and they're all in perfect condition with no damage at all.
While my Friday afternoons are free i'll be putting a few more free sessions in and its always good to keep practising a method you dont use very often like the feeder and even just casting practise!!
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