Back to fishing, after 3 years!

After 3 years of no fishing at all, I have decided to get back into the sport of angling.

I went fishing yesterday, 30th June, with my dad to a nice group of lakes in Petworth, West Sussex. I had purchased my Rod License online the day before and since I had all my tackle from my past years, I was all ready to go.

When we pitched up, we had a look around the lakes. We found the one at the far end to be a nice one, and chose a nice swim there. After rigging, we tested the depth of the water. It was very deep at our swim and there was a lot of wind, making it harder to see our floats. So, we moved down the lake slightly to a more covered and shallower swim. Once rigged, I used 2 red maggots as bait and tossed in the line. The lake supposedly was full of tench, only small tench at about 2 or 3 pounds, and lots of crucian carp. I never caught a tench before and my dad used to catch them all the time when he was a kid, but he had hardly seen any when him and I used to go.

Anyway, after about 10 minutes of the line being in the water, I had a reoccurring nibble on the bait. I waited about 30 seconds and the suddenly the float was gone. I struck and had a little fight with this fish. I brought it to the surface and realized it was a tench! My first tench on my first time fishing in 3 years! I was pleased. He wasn't too big, I'd say about 1 pound and a half.

After that my dad threw his line in and caught a few crucians with me catching them too. He then hooked himself a nice tench and between us we had caught about 4 carp and 2 tench. The swim then died. We had no bites for about 2 hours. It was in the middle of the afternoon about 1pm and we didn't hook a fish until 3pm. This is most probably because tench, and carp, don't like sunlight. The light was streaming down on the water and it obviously put them off a bit.

When it reached about 3 or 4pm we were catching a lot and this continued until about 8. We packed up finishing with me catching the biggest tench of the day at about 2 and a half pounds. As I said they weren't massive, but it was good fishing. Not a silver fish in sight, which I quite enjoyed. Roach and Rudd are fun, but they do get highly annoying, especially if you want the bigger ones.

We came home all sunburnt and very pleased anglers. I'm just looking forward to out next trip which should be sometime in the next couple of weeks!