Saturday mornings are usually chilled out lazy affairs in my house, the kids get up and watch television whilst I get a well deserved lay in normally followed by a cooked breakfast. This Saturday however I was heading out early to work a local stretch of river on the hunt for a stripey using the light lure set up.

With the alarm buzzing at 6:30am I rolled out of bed, normally I would be dozing at this time on a Saturday still but there was fishing to be done. I was being picked up by my wingman Tom at 7:30, the deal was that he drove to the spot and I provided the bacon butties and coffee when he got to my house. He turned up and with me keeping my end of the deal we were on our way to the river filled up on bacon sarnies, fuelled up for a morning wandering the bank.

It was a beautiful crisp morning, the sun was breaking through and the dew was glistening on the grass as we walked across from the car park. As soon as we reached the river we started chucking the lures around and working the water. It wasn’t long before Tom had some interest with a pike following him in, this was a half decent sized fish but it was not hitting the lure. The croc just sat in the water watching the lure move past him and after another couple of casts the pike drifted back into the darker deeper water. I was next into some action as a tiny jack pike shot out and hit my shad, for a couple of seconds nothing happened, the jack just sat in the water with the lure broadside in its mouth. We eyeballed each other waiting for somebody to make the next move, he didn’t have the hook I could see that and after staring me out he dropped the shad and shot back across the water.

The next couple of hours were spent tirelessly working the bank, Tom had caught a small jack and I had hooked a nice perch well over a pound only to have the hook pull out under my feet. That was highly frustrating as it’s never nice having a good sized target fish lost in the dying moments of a fight, but it showed the perch were on the feed. We had worked our way downstream and then worked our way back, casting lures at all the likely looking spots with me losing another small jack. Tom was next to get excited as a lovely sized fish rushed out from under a tree, following him right to the bank but yet again not hitting the lure.

We had one last try to catch some fish at a weir pool above where we had started fishing, with Tom starting at a bit in-front of some reeds I walked up to where the concrete structure of the pool was. I dropped my shad down into a dark deep pool just off the concrete and instantly the rod smacked over, nothing hooked so I dropped it back in exactly the same place. This time the culprit was on and after a spirited  fight a perfect little perch was soon on the bank. Target achieved and after firing off some pics it was released back into it’s watery, dark, deep abode to hopefully grow into a 3lb’er one day.

That was it for the morning and we both left happy, I had caught my target and Tom had fished a new bit of water that he enjoyed. We both know it has future potential to produce some very big fish this winter and I am certain that double figure pike and big sergeants are waiting for us on our return.