Several Shefford & District AA members have enjoyed some excellent catches with stillwaters still grabbing the headlines. With the carp still showing signs of spawning, Richie Brown decided to target the catfish at The Airman during a recent 48 hour session. Richie managed to land four good catfish of 28lb 12oz, 34lb 8oz, 35lb 7oz and 40lb 9oz, and lost another two fish to hook pulls. Martin Yateman visited the venue for the first time and decided to target the tench during a short 3h session armed with just a light float rod, some luncheon meat and a few micro pellets. He manage a 4lb tench on a pea size piece of meat, but at about 9pm got attached to something bigger, which turned out to be a low double figure catfish. This was the first catfish Martin had ever seen let alone caught and he did well to land it on such light tackle. Carp are still showing well at Willington Lake with the pick of the catches being a 7 carp haul taken by Matt Wren on his first trip to the venue. Matt’s fish all fell within a 24h spell during a 48h session with one mirror carp weighing 28lb 13oz and the other 3 commons and 3 mirrors in the 14-18lb range. Several carp to 20lb have been caught from different areas of the lake with a number of bream to low double figures also landed. Ken Rirsch went with the initial aim of targeting the tench and soon landed a 6lb 8oz tinca but then the perch and roach moved in on his bait. Switching from ledger to float and experimenting with different hook baits soon upped his catch rate and Ken ended up with an excellent mixed bag of fish with a good number of roach in the 12oz to 1lb bracket. Michael Kell enjoyed some excellent sport at Broom Lake float fishing sweetcorn just off the bottom close in towards the margins, whilst loose feeding maggots. Michael’s tactics produced a great bag of roach up to a pound, a female tench just over the 7lb mark and finally a 13lb common carp. Other anglers fishing light float tactics have been enjoying good sport with John Wigg landing 50 good roach, a couple of perch to a pound and a decent skimmer bream on his favourite pole method. Plenty of carp are still being caught with surface baits and zig rigs working best during the day when the carp are in the upper layers, with bottom baits scoring at night. Hopefully the road works on the B658 will be finished before the weekend, but care still needs to be exercised whilst travelling down the track to the lake where heavy earth moving equipment is crossing the track. There was little news from the opening days of the river season, except it is worth noting the weir pool at Little Paxton produced several small barbel in the 2-4lb class that suggests the barbel are successfully breeding in this section of the Ouse. A reminder to all members that you need to sign your new membership books before fishing any SDAA water in order to confirm that you have read and agree to abide by the rules of the club. In addition to the general rules, there are also some fishery specific rules. Please note that the use of leadcore is now banned on all SDAA waters. Any member found guilty of leaving litter or fouling the fisheries can expect a lengthy ban.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 05:20:58 +0000