6/06/2007

This was actually the session I had originally planned for the previous day, with the idea being that I would spend a few hours targeting Bleak.

I arrived at the swim at 5.30pm with the temperature bank side stifling. The swim is in a wooded area, accessed from an overgrown path a few hundred meters from the bridge by the Klaipeda Botanical Gardens on the outskirts of Tauralaukis village.

My initial tactic was to fish 24 inches deep with all of the shot locking (no dropper shot), and after a slow start I finally got my first fish, but not a Bleak but a Stickleback, the first I have caught in Lithuania. It was pretty big for a Stickleback and absolutely covered in Argulus.

The Bleak did then start to come, but only to a little over an ounce and when you look at how big a Bleak weighing an ounce actually looks, it makes you think about how big the 9oz British record must have been.

After an hour I decided to deepen off and fish around a rod length out, just over the pads in the margin. I fed brown crumb mixed with casters and a roach additive and loose fed maggot with single white maggot as my hook bait. Almost immediately I was into a nice Rudd.

I fished for a little over 3 hours in total with 53 fish of which around half were Bleak with the remainder made up of nice Rudd, roach and Skimmers to exactly 11oz.

When I left to watch the football the fish were feeding and there were still a couple of hours of light so I am sure I could have stretched the bar a little more.