Catch – 9 Bream, 1 Roach.
Weather - Sunny & cloudy. Very still start, then a slight breeze.
Water temp – 17.5c > 18.5c
A days fishing with Mark Poppleton, or Slider to those who know him from the Total Fishing forum, is always interesting.
I regularly correspond with Mark by e-mail, where he tells me of his great catches, the matches he frames in and then he goes fishing with me. He seems to think I am some sort of jinx. The last time we went fishing was at the Curry Pound on the Kennet & Avon Canal in Devizes. His e-mail went along the lines of I caught 27 tench, it was great. We turn up I catch 1 tench & 1 bream, whilst Mark caught 1 roach!
So when I received an e-mail from Mark saying he had recently been to Silverlands Lake, where 1 of his mates had been catching 100lb bags of bream I was interested, but I should have known better.
Silverlands Lake is just outside Lacock in Wiltshire. I had never seen the place, but I had sourced advice from a number of people. What I was told is the water is mainly fished by the bivvy boys for the carp that are few in number, but do exceed 20lb+. I was also told the lake was only 3-4ft deep and fairly uniform in depth, but the stories of big bags of bream had been confirmed. What was interesting was the required bait. Although these bream must see a lot of pellet & boilies, red maggot was the best bait.
So at 5am, yes 5am I turned up with a load of micro pellet, 2kgs of groundbait, 3 small tins of corn and a handful of red maggot.
When I first saw the lake, I was very impressed, it looked very natural, there was an early morning light mist coming off the surface of the water and the prospects looked good. Most of the lake was taken up by bivvys, but Mark & I found a spot to fish.
The intention was to fish the pole, although I had been told the feeder works well here, but personally I prefer to watch a float, than the tip of a rod. The problem however is I’m waiting for a no5 section for my N47 pole and I have been using a super taper section (replaces no.4 & 5 section), which I managed to leave at home!Fortunately I had brought a waggler rod. So 7 balls of groundbait, with loads of micro pellet went out at 20m. Mark settled at 13m, although he commented his peg was a foot shallower than the last one he fished.
As expected the fish took a little while to turn up and I landed a 1lb skimmer after 30mins. My waggler rig was a 3ssg Drake Loaded Bodied Waggler fished slightly overdepth, which was sitting perfectly in the calm conditions and that was a problem. The weather forecast was for cloud, showers and a breeze. What we had was flat calm & bright conditions, hardly the best for to catching bream.
As the session progressed it became apparent we were going to struggle, due to the weather. There seemed to be fish in the swim, but they weren’t taking the bait confidently, until the sun either went behind a cloud or the breeze picked up to create a ripple.
To help keep the fish in the swim I catapulted a pouch 4mm expanders, every cast, which seemed to helped. After 3 hours the swim died completely, so a further 6 balls of groundbait went out, plus 3 pouches of expanders. Fortunately the bream returned and I snared a few more bream, before the swim completely died.
I only weighed 27lb 10oz, which was lower than expected, but the quality of the bream was impressive. The biggest weighed 4lb 5oz, but they were healthy classical looking bream, who have obviously got big on pellets. I will definitely be back. As for Mark, he managed 4lb of bits. He felt fishing the waggler further out was the key for success on the day, however the most important thing is its 4-0 to me so far this year!
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