March started in much the same way as February ended. There was a calm dry spell and with the evenings started to draw out, I grabbed literally an hour after to work to try for a Pike, right on dusk. I could have fished into darkness had I been fishing with bite alarms but I really do love float fishing, in all its forms, whenever I can. So, I fished until I couldn’t see the floats any more. And it worked. The result wasn’t a big female as I was hoping but a sprightly little jack made the most of the hour I had.
Then, on the Friday afternoon of the same week, with conditions continuing with only a bit of light rain during the week and the river levels looking good, we opted for our annual grayling outing. I’ve never fished for grayling so late in the season with previous trips always falling around the Christmas period. When we arrived, the river was lower than I’d ever fished it before and much clearer too. It always carries colour and we’ve fished in pretty much zero visibility before but this was clear for two or three feet! OK, not exactly chalk stream clear but you could make out the bottom which was interesting to help select the runs we fished. In fact, with the river so much lower we fished several areas that we hadn’t before, simply because previously they were unfished due to the pace of the river. We started in the bridge pool as we always do. We fed maggots whilst we brewed coffee (food and drink prepared outdoors always tastes better) and waited until we made the first runs through with the float. I’d hoped for a really quick bite was we’d been feeding maggots for around 20 minutes before we fished. If you can be patient and feed like this, you really can get fish, of any species competing for the food to the point where even the wiliest old fish will be catchable.
The quick bite didn’t come but Mike kept on running the float through the swim and searching the every inch of the pool. Eventually the float dipped under and a strike was met with solid resistance. At first it looked like the hook and snagged the bottom as Mike had been adjusting the depth to get the bait just trickling across the bottom and an effort to tease out a fish. But the bottom moved. And in the clear water we spotted a very large fish rise off the bottom and start twisting. When you’re used to catching fish of a few ounces from the water, spotting something that would be weighed in pounds and not ounces, that’s exciting! But as quickly as the excitement rose, it was dashed again. The hooked pulled and we were left with unhealthy heart beats and knocking knees. Mike is sure he saw yellow in the belly of the fish, I’m colour blind so I just saw a big fish. The colour suggests it was a big out of season brown trout rather than the hoped for grayling. Either way, it was a bloody good fish that was now filed in the, “one that got away” story book. Gutted but smiling, we carried on the see if we could raise another, or maybe even the same one. I took a turn fishing the pool and hooked, and landed, a fine fish but it was another out of season brownie. The hook was slipped out whilst the fish was in the water, and awaaaay!
We moved on and fished our way down the beat exploring the river which looked so different to our previous trips now that the water was so much lower. We fished and we caught, but everything was a brown trout. No sign of a grayling. Maybe they like the higher water? Maybe late in the season just isn’t so good for them. We don’t know, we don’t know what we’re doing when we go grayling fishing! But it’s always so much fun, and we’ll go back again next season and we’ll try again. Although I am tempted to go back with the fly rod when the trout season starts to fish for those brownies properly.
The rest of the month was dry but was accompanied by the dreaded east wind. I’ve written about it loads before, I just don’t like fishing in an east wind, and it just wouldn’t shift. I did a little bit of exploring on some new water, taking the marker rod, doing some planning for what will hopefully be some tench fishing later in the spring. It felt like that was the best use of my limited time whilst the weather wasn’t conducive (in my opinion) to catching.
Just before the clocks changed, during that spell right at the end of March when the mornings are getting light around 5am, I did fish a Friday morning before work. I did a little feeder fishing which I haven’t done for ages. It was nice to get those rods back out and plop the method feeders out. There are loads of gadgets in the fishing world and I would class a lot of them at gimmicks (I probably just don’t know how to use them or I can’t afford them) but I think methods feeders are brilliant. It’s not a lovely as fishing with a float but you can’t cover everything with a float. These method feeder things, especially the ones from Drennan, are simple to use and really effective. I’ve deployed my GoPro waterproof camera into water loads of times and it’s really interesting watching fish feed and how different species have different ways of picking up bait. The Crucian Carp that I’ve watched come down vertically (they don’t have the same mouth shape as a king carp), pick up the food and then rise up vertically for a moment before righting themselves. This makes total sense when the see the bites on a float, and way they can be so hard to hook. A method feeder with a really short hooklength, is a really efficient (I don’t like that word in fishing, it sounds too calculated) way of hooking them they as they back up vertically and the hook sets. Anyway, I digress. It was optimistic to try and catch a Tench from a really deep lake that hadn’t warmed up yet, but it was good to be out using the morning light and listening to the dawn chorus. No Tench were caught but the rod tips were kept bouncing away as a string of mostly Rudd but a few Roach and Bream came to the net. Hopefully they will become Tench in the next few weeks.
So there were no records set in March but compared to the last couple of years fishing in March, the time felt like it was used well to have a bit of fun when I could and do the jobs and the preparation that should hopefully come to fruition later in the year. If it’s fun I’m happy!
Good luck!