The Proverbial London Bus

After drawing a blank at Stratford, my first blank of the entire year in fact, I would never have expected to follow it up with not just a second fishless session, but then a third too. It's not that I didn't get bites, I did, but for some unfathomable reason I could not hook the fish doing the biting...



My chosen peg was the entrance of Exhall Marina, one of the most popular pegs on the Coventry Canal round these parts. I set up two light feeder rods and cast feed of liquidised bread and red maggots every five minutes on each rod in rotation for the first hour into entrance way to build up the swim. Bait was breadflake and maggot cocktail to deter the perch and attract bream and hopefully my target species for the session, the rather elusive silver bream.



It had been spitting rain for the past few hours but now it began to come down hard making the filling of feeders with bread groundbait a very sticky process! Even though I was under a brolly I find it nigh impossible to keep hands dry and clean whilst fishing in the rain.



The puddles on the towpath grew larger and larger. Another hour of this and I'd be able to fish in them too!



The bites came one every ten minutes, but I missed them all - Lord knows what was happening out there. It was perplexing and exasperating suffering the face screwing frustration of striking air time and time again. Of course some of these bites could have been liners, but not all. When I did eventually hook a fish the hooklength just parted at the loop knot under very little strain - I'd tied it on straight out of the pack and had not given it a test of strength before using it. Stupid of me...



Eventually the rain eased and then stopped altogether, and with rain went the bites. I fished on another hour but packed it in when it became obvious that the fish had turned off the feed.

Last night I went out once again, this time to my usual silver bream stretch where I thought I might have better luck. I needn't have bothered as I had just the one little rattle of the quivertip over three hours of otherwise uninterrupted inactivity.



I stayed on till I could no longer see the rod tops just to see if the dark would improve matters. It didn't.



Ah well. I'd done my level best but to avoid them but like the proverbial London bus, I'd not seen a blank all year and then three turned up one after the other.

Let's hope there's not another coming around the corner...