Reservoir Bream: PB Fish in Testing Times.

 It had been nearly a month ago that this plan was hatched, during a short message to Brian whilst I was in Thailand a trip to Walthamstow Reservoir was pencilled in. We initially thought a day session would be a good idea but a bit of research revealed that our intended day of fishing coincided with the first night fishing date on the calender, "Great" we both agreed instantly and fast forward a few weeks and travelled a few thousand miles in between I arrived yesterday morning to collect a somewhat under-gunned Pike angler for 36 hours of Bream fishing.

 After arriving at the venue to draw swims for the night fishing we headed off to find a suitable looking swim that we felt Bream would be patrolling, past experience has taught me that the shoals move in huge numbers whilst foraging and whilst eating vast quantities of food our arsenal had to be up to scratch (25kg of pellets 4mm, 1kg of corn, 5kg of spod-mix and plenty of other feed should it be needed, the rigs that I started with was one helicopter rig with 2 real grains and 1 fake grain of corn fished with a 25g cage feeder and the other rod with 2x10mm Ellipse pellets tipped with fake maize.

S-core, caster, maggot and 4mm pellet spod mix.

One of my feeder rigs.

 A stiff wind blew northerly the entire time and our swim seemed to be in a good position strategically, after a decent bed was pumped out it was time to wait and see what happened, this is where I start to struggle, sat behind rods and waiting for the fish to come to me is very difficult to achieve, I know I have ants in my pants but that's just me and that'll never change, the very idea of sitting behind rods for that amount of time did cross my mind when organising it, but if I'm to achieve my goal of a 15lb+ Bream then I'm going to need to do something along those lines.

 Nearly 7 hours passed without any sort of indication, that was long enough for me, I had a little mooch up the reservoir and learnt that a fellow angler had just had two Bream in quick succession, that meant one thing, the fish were shoaled up and feeding elsewhere. Having made a tough decision with all of our kit we knew a move had to be made, a proper toil but necessary. I felt happier with our new position but there was plenty of baiting up to do to get the Bream to hang around, or so I thought, proceedings after 3 hours looked bleak, funnily enough there was a reason for the dire amount of activity, I unfortunately found out that the Bream had spawned around 7-10 days ago and haven't got on the feed yet, it explained alot.

16.15, chunky Common, but not a Bream.

 So you could imagine my surprise when my right hand rod screamed off as a Carp tore off up the reservoir, a good sturdy fight followed in the margins before nestling in the net and soon after as dusk approached, the take I wanted......a slow and deliberate run was the classic tell tale Bream run and it was, just over a minute later a new personal best Bream lye on the bank!

11.07, a new PB and very pleased with that fish.

Off back home, what a slab.

 Just the fish I was looking for, the numbers of fish was disappointing but I got my initial target, all I was hoping for then was a busy night, but before that could commence a wander off to Pizza Hut was in order to fill the gap and also make sure we had brekkie too, only Pizza can do both!.

 Busy night? It didn't really happen, bang on 2am the rod tore off again and a heavier fish plodded around for five minutes before gently cruising into the net, a pretty Mirror of 18.07, but that was as busy as it got, I nodded off sporadically and keeping an eye on the rods but were untouched for the remainder of our time, it was clear that it was not going to happen, at 10am we decided to call it a day. On the way home we decided to drop off to a local canal and it was brilliant, but that will follow soon.....