Arriving at the Bluebell complex at 2pm on a Saturday is generally not the best idea, but with the big south west wind and unseasonably mild weather forecast I couldn’t resist booking the Monday off work, and that turned out to be a good decision!
I arrived to find Mallard Lake very busy on the roadside on the back of the wind but hardly any anglers were on the far side of the lake, so I decided to head over with the barrow and have a look about.
After standing in a swim where I could see most of the lake I managed to see half a dozen shows out towards the middle so I quickly sorted out 3 pre tied solid bags and cast them into the abyss as far as I could while I sorted my shelter etc.
Not long after I’d made my first coffee the rod was away, and I landed a nice mid double, and my first fish of 2020.
Another similar sized fish soon followed and I went into the night extremely confident of more action.
Sure enough I had a blistering take at 3.30am and after donning the waders eventually it cut me off on the steep drop off out in front of me where at about 50 yards out it drops from 5-18ft very quickly.
I then reeled one of my rods in the following morning and that again caught the slope. I reeled in a massive ball of weed with the biggest amount of zebra mussels I’d ever seen so I decided I had to move.
After securing a swim accessing a similar area a few hours later I found a nice clean gravel area out at 100 yards and put 3 on the spot with about a kilo of 12mm Beta’nana and corn to which I add 5ml of Betalin per kg in the winter and is 100% an edge.
I managed a couple more in the evening including a stunning near fully scaled but the rest of the night was quiet.
I woke up early and didn’t see any signs of fish, and with only 6 hours of the session to go I thought that was it.
Then all hell broke loose at 8.30am and all 3 rods went off one after another with 3 more upper doubles.
I quickly got the rods back out with some more bait and within half an hour 2 more doubles were safely netted.
I then decided to change over to white nana pop ups, I’d had all the fish on white nana wafters but thought I’d change and see if I could pick off a better fish.
Whether it made a difference is debatable but the next bite came and resulted in a lovely mirror of just under 23lb
I got the rod back out quickly and started packing away, I was about to reel the first rod in and the right rod melted off, after a short hard scrap a nice chestnut common was safely netted and went 24lb.
It was a great way to end an awesome session, no monsters but for the first week of February I went home a very happy angler!
Be lucky!
Paul
