Day 1 - 14th May 25

Intro

I intend to write up each day - warts and all - not just the good days (please let there be some).

River Vechte

I have missed river fishing with our closed season (no comment). I thought a trip to the Vechte would ease me into the fishing and allow me to check that I have everything assembled correctly (I flat-pack my Octbox to save room when travelling) and that I have remembered any extras (e.g video equipment).

As you can probably tell from the Intro, this was a "warts" day. 

I didn't get to the peg until 10am despite being awake early. Once I setup my box, I mixed the groundbait to let it settle and then had a cast around with my "Deeper" to find out what the depth was and what the bottom looked like. It looked like it was around 11ft from half to three quarters of the way across (about 30m). Then it slowly shallowed to about 8 feet as you came closer. However there was a noticable shelf up to 6ft and this was about 8m out. Interestingly the  "Deeper" beeped at me to indicate fish in the vicinity of the shelf. So, I made a note of this and hoped to fish a bolo down there later on.

Once I decided on my range, I balled in 20 - 30 balls of groundbait laced with hemp, wheat, caster, chopped worm and corn.

It was now just after 11am. Not the ideal time to start but I was easing myself into it.

I decided on just one rod to start with, hoping it would be too frantic for two rods. After about 45 mins I decided to cast out the second feeder rod. One was using a worm/corn cocktail and the second was maggot.

I took about 90 mins after balling in before I got a few savage bites. When I finally hit one, Perch were the culprits. Until 4:15 I had only managed 4 Perch. Three were small (3 - 4 ozs) and the other was about 1.5 lb. 

Also the wind was increasing as the day went on. It was an upstream wind and the flow was very slight. That meant that the bolo would be a challenge so I setup a waggler hoping that a sunken line wouldnt't be affected by the wind and would run through with the slight flow. I managed two runs through before the slow stopped completely. That put paid to waggler fishing so decided to put one feeder on that waggler line and left the other 3/4 across.

I had decided to pack-up at 5pm but, wouldn't you know, I started to get bites quite regularly. I finally got a small Bream of a about 2lb, a few more small Perch, an 8oz Ide and a skimmer of about 8oz.

By 6pm it was clear that the fish weren't playing ball so I finished the session.

I still had quite a bit of groundbait and particles left so decided to pre-bait that canal confluence that I mentioned yesterday. It is only 3 minutes from my digs. Again I cast around with the Deeper and could see that it was around 3ft deep amongst the lillies (no surprise there) but dropped off to around 7ft in the main channel. It did look quite weedy as opposed to the Vechte that had a clear bottom. I got many chirps from suspected fish but they may have been false positives from the weed.

My plan is to have an early start tomorrow and have a couple of hours at the confluence over my pre-bait before adding more bait and then moving on. I may well try the Ijssel tomorrow - not decided yet. The plan is to keep the bait going into the confluence and then fish it a few times - especially on days-off where I may sneak in an early or late session before doing something else for the main part of the day.