A Very Popular Peg

Walking the dog along the canal is a daily chore that cannot be avoided, and because springers are the fittest and most fanatical of dogs this means walks of at least a mile or two twice a day and twice a week they require long strolls of anything up to six miles. If they don't get this much of a work out then their natural propensity for hard graft turns in upon itself and they will start to eat the house and its contents.


I don't mind. I get to watch the canal and its inhabitants. I also get to know everything there is to know about how the canal is fishing because one way or the other I get to meet every angler who tries. Now that the weather has turned chilly and damp the pleasure anglers have all but disappeared and have been replaced by predator hunters after pike and zander. They are a very conservative bunch, and always, without fail, fish the same peg. Actually this peg, opposite Exhall basin marina entrance is easily the most popular swim with all kinds of anglers for miles in either direction, a popularity based upon a convenient location next to a car park, a comfortable grassy backdrop with handy perk bench, but most of all, its local reputation for producing lots of fish of all species - a reputation gained only by dint of the fact that it's fished so bloody often!

Anyway, a bloke I met there the other day caught a three pound zander that he wanted for the pot, so he knocked it on the head and gutted it on the bank and a couple of fellas the other morning landed this very nice pike, just as I was approaching; his personal best at fourteen pounds.



I have also heard on the grapevine of a twenty eight pounder caught from the same spot just a few weeks ago.

You see, this is why so many people fish this peg! Because of the telling and the retelling of stories. True, apocryphal or just plain tall, it doesn't really matter, does it?