Had a window of opportunity open up for me and with local the rivers having benefitted from a splash of rain I decided to head down to the River Soar again.
Popped into Stapleford Angling for a pint of maggots and a quick chat before heading down the short distance down the motorway to Kegworth. River was gin clear and there were clumps of the dreaded, bright green, floating pennywort starting to take hold everywhere. Once up at the weir I could see that, despite the recent rain, the water level was even lower than my previous visit and the bed of lillies that I'd been standing in had already virtually died off. On the plus side I could see lots of small fish milling about.
Started off with the float rod but had to wade out a lot further in order to reach the main flow. However, after I'd settled and run the float down a few times it was obvious that the fish were up for a feed. Whilst the chub, dace and bleak were waiting out in the flow, if the float went offline and ended up in the slacker water the roach and small bream (possibly silver bream judging by the size of the eye relative to the head?) were there to take advantage.
Carried on for about two hours, buidling up the swim and amassing over 60 fish before I decided a change of tactic was in order. Had a brief dabble with the feeder rod at the end of my last session that had me thinking that the better fish were hanging off the back of the swim and mopping up any loose feed that made it through to them. Had therefore come armed with a new weapon - the "dink-dink" rig. Made popular in the 1990s match scene and used to such good effect on rivers like the Trent it originally consisted of a block-end feeder running on a large loop with the hook tied directly to the "tail" of the figure of eight loop knot. Bob Roberts devotes a short chapter to the history of the dink-dink in his excellent book "The Mighty Trent".
However, for a more contempary take on the method and the version of the rig that I was using on this occasion see Rikki Richard's YouTube video here. Baited up the size 16 widegape with a couple of maggots, filled the black-cap feeder and then lobbed it out to rest at the far end of my float swim. The rod had been in the rests for literally seconds when the rod tip started bouncing violently and I lifted into a small chub. Quickly added a couple more before some better dace took over. It is obviously a very effective method, but one that requires very little finesse or skill as there is no need to strike as the fish basically hooked themselves! In fact, trying to strike just results in missed fish. It's also very intensive as the feeder needs to be re-filled as soon as it is empty. Consequently, after adding a dozen dace along with a bonus perch, I found that I had quickly run out of maggots.
With about half an hour of daylight left I therefore swapped the dink-dink for a perch paternoster rig, popped on a small roach that I'd retained from earlier and dropped it in the margins to my right. Whilst I'd spotted a decent perch last time out, this was more in hope than expectation as I'd not seen a single sign of any predators on this occasion despite the presence of large numbers of silver fish. True enough, as the darkness descended I wound the rod in and gave my un-touched bait his freedom back, packed up and headed home. With more rain forecast this week the rivers will hopefully get another much-needed refresh, so we'll see if we can fit in another session somewhere.
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