The Venue..
This was to be my first outing in over a month and Id decided to head back to The Oaks in Sessay and go back to Cedar.The Oaks is around an hour and 20 mins drive from my home in sunderland, so I needed to be there in good time to get a decent session in before heading home to family duties. I’d fished there about 5 weeks ago in an area with little form (as I later found out) and hadnt done brilliantly, so looking at match
results I wanted to be around peg 56 if possible but on arrival a club match was scheduled for pegs 50-80 when I arrived so i went for peg 32 which had also shown some form recently.
For anyone not familiar with The Oaks, the fishery has a number of lakes, some for matches only and others pleasure or mixed. Cedar is a commercial snake lake that holds about 80 pegs, so the match had little impact on where I would fish.. The peg was at the north end of the lake which is very picturesque. There is a bank of pine trees at your back which have been cut for pole access. The margins are grass lined with a good depth close in and the island again has trees making the peg very sheltered. In fact there was hardly a breath of wind on the lake at all, whether this would be good or bad for me I’d have to find out. I’d left Tyne & Wear under a thick veil of fog and a paltry 9° C, Sessay was cloudy but a barmy 16°C and fish were showing everywhere. I wasn’t expecting to blank !
I set up taking my usual age to get ready (how do I fix that ?) mixing groundbait, etc and plumbed up.
Id been advised to look for 2′ of water across, but at the full 13m of my Grim Reaper I was still nowhere near the far bank and in 3.5′ to 4′ of water. So I decided to fish straight out as far as possible with meat and corn over some hemp.An 8m swim at 45 ° with pellet over groundbait and straight out at 2+1 with meat over meat/corn/hemp (in hindsight putting this directly in front as well wasnt the best idea)
The Baits..
I had 2 tins of cubed meat (1 supermarket, one dynamite baits which was just too soft to stay on the hook.
2 pints of maggots
A pint of wetted fishery micros with a variety of expanders and hook pellets.
A tin of corn.
Some old ghost F1 match groundbait (which smells totally vile when i opened it in my opinion) plus a little special g green
The Rigs…
Im in the process of replacing some old diameters of pole line, so the rigs were tied on a real mixture.
The 13m line had a NG gimp .3g on 0.14 middy low viz to .0125 matrix micro and B911 F1 16.
A DJK Pencil 0.3g with the same line/hook was for the short line
And finally for the pellet line I had a .4g matrix pencil on .12 gline to .10 preston precision.
I would look at the margins after a few hours as there was a cutway in the near reeds about 6m down the edge into 2 feet of water but would not feed until 30 mins before fishing.
I fed the meat lines sparingly with a pinch of hemp plus about 5-6 grains of corn and 3-4 cubes of meat.
The pellet line was just fed with micros plus a tennis ball size of groundbait which I topped up every 5 mins a dozen or so micros via a catty whilst throwing in 3-5 cubes of meat short.
The Fishing..
Eventually I started at 10.30 on the long line with a cube of meat and found my current obsession with going for float tips designed for sensitivity (still in winter mode I guess !) was going to cause me trouble all day. The floats were just too fine to support meat and corn. After 10 mins I had a bite and landed a 4oz perch; not quite what I expected. This was followed by a dumpy 6oz roach both on a 4mm cube of meat. So I decided to cup in some more bait and try 8m. In all honesty I pretty much abandoned the long line as it wasn’t fun fishing full length tbh and having to re-ship every time the bait came off after a missed bite.
Moving onto the pellet line and it was slow going with lots of missed bites on a 4mm expander. I switched to a 6mm jellet which was a lot more durable and had a few F1s and a couple of roach.
I refed this line and tried meat short. Again I was faced with the sinking float syndrome and lots of missed bites but had a few more nice F1s and some dumpy roach, then everything went quiet for an hour. I was still getting occassional bites but not connecting which was really frustrating, maybe I should have stepped up the hook size or drastically alter the feeding. I plugged away but really should have tried a new maggot line for silvers as I could have caught small fish all day long this way but I was focussed on bigger baits for bigger fish I think and it would have put fish in the net whilst waiting for the carp/F1s to switch back on. Eventually I tried upping the feed on the short line and after getting swirls on the top I decided to try shallow, lifting and dropping the bait or flicking out and holding it tight. This got me back amongst the fish, some lovely F1s and ide before a ‘proper’ carp took the meat hookbait. The fish made an initial run before plodding about for 10 mins, before it took off again. It was a long lean fish that I was a bit disappointed was 6.5lbs. The fight on grey hydro had made me think it had to be a double so I was a little disappointed to find it was nearer half that, I was sure it was going to be my P.B pole fish. Never mind it was a lovely looking mirror that fought really well but I was probably extra careful on the .125 bottom as I really wanted to land it !
The fish came and went in bursts and on trying the margin swim for the last 90 mins I picked up another half dozen fish, a couple more F1s and carp to 3lbs or so. I did lose a couple of better fish from this swim at least one of which was foul hooked from the scale that came back on the hook ! Alternating the margins with the now heavier fed 3m line and I also picked up some big ide to 2.5lbs and what I was sure was a chub of around the same weight.
I packed up after 5 hours to fight back through the traffic and on lifting the net out Id guess about 60lb maybe a bit more (im rubbish at estimating weights !) Not a huge weight but still a good day for me. On the day perhaps but id gotten too sidetracked. 2 lines plus the margins would have sufficed with deep and shallow rigs set up rather than starting 3 from the off. I need to stop over complicating things !
The oaks certainly is a very well ran fishery offering different types of lakes for different types of anglers In a beautiful, clean setting.The tackle shop offers pretty much everything you’d need once you’re on the bank as well. The fish are in great condition and I will be back soon. I just wish the entire place could be moved 40 miles north !
Thanks if you’ve taken the time to read my ramblings. Tight elastics !
Robin
p.s.
A few weeks ago my mate Tony from Fishing Republic Sunderland dropped something sharp and pointy onto his Daiwa Air at Whiteacres resulting in a nice bullet hole type shape in one of the big sections. Of course I didnt mock or take the p***. So at the end of the session I was taking care packing up (despite my best intenions my peg usually looks like a hurricane has hit after 5 hours) I stepped over the no.4 section on my brand new Grim Reaper only I didnt…A 3″ crack down the top. So this weekend it’s off to see Tony at the shop. Where did I put my humble pie again ?
UPDATE.... total over reaction. The crack was less than an inch and easily repaired. Panic over !
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