More like it.............

Theres fewer better looking things than a natural venue on a nice calm morning.  Theres probably only one way to improve it and thats to slap a seat box on the edge of it and get at it.

Even with a later than usual start time one half of Team Kavo stayed in bed, so I found myself on the side of this beauty on my own with winter roach once again the target. On what is a very deep venue I decided on fishing the feeder and having a relaxed quiet day. At 25 yards I was getting a count of 17 so a solid 20grm feeder was clipped on and cast 6 times into the lake. Loaded with caster and hemp
and plugged both ends with a mix of Sensas Gros Gardons and Sensas Lake, I was confident.
A size 16 Tubertini 808 was then attached and time to see whats out there. Two red mags to start with
and within minutes a couple of small taps on the 1/2oz tip and it's roach number one. Re cast and it's same again, tap tap and lift, second roach and things are looking promising. It's odd how things go sometimes but after 30 minutes and despite trying different hook baits, shorter hooklength and down to a size 18 hook I'm still on two fish !!! A short wander back to the car for a cuppa and a rethink had me back on the box with my trusty 6m whip in hand. Now their for it I reckoned and as I finished my cuppa I kickstarted the swim with two balls of groundbait laced with caster and hemp. The groundbait was the same, though I added more liquid from the hemp to help bind it so that it would go down better in the 10 feet of water and I darkened it with some black Tracix.
The rig was a Preston 1Grm float with a small bulk half way and 3 droppers to the hooklength, initially this worked well but a bit of a blow got up and I changed up to a 1.5 Grm Preston float.
A 1Grm Olivette half way down and 4 small droppers seemed to be just right and the bites were
now coming thick and fast. It was vintage stuff, cast, feed, strike, swing, unhook, keepnet, clicker and repeat the process. Over the next few hours I did that over and over and ended up with 70 silvers. Mainly small roach, a few perch and some very small skimmers. I missed a few in fairness but thankfully not that many. The feeding was key and as long as I fed a small, very small nugget of groundbait I could almost time the bites. I experimented with loose feeding but it lead to very few bites and was probably bringing fish up off the bottom and scattering them all round the place.
As soon as I went back to the nuggets of groundbait I got the bites back.
Over the course of the day I got chatting to a few lads from Dublin who were pegged to my right,
3 generations of anglers, Son, Dad and Grandad, great to see and as I was catching well I gave the youngest a few casts. Good lad that he was, straight into a few fish and despite it being his first time
swinging he got the hang of it quite quickly. I'd planned to pack up at 15.30 hrs and having reached 50 fish at 14.30 I decided I'd try to get 70, so when the young lad (James) arrived behind me as I bagged number 69 I asked him if he wanted to get number 70 and he duly did.

James' was the one in the middle.......

So ended a great day on what was a new venue for me. It's close enough to home and seems to be
well stocked with  silvers, though they were all small. In the words of a few different bad guys,
I'll be back.