In April I fished in the Team England Lure Squad Trials Bewl Water click here for the official press release to summarise what happened over the weekend. Below is my summary of the weekend.
To start I arrived late as I did not set my alarm for the correct time so only arrived with about 15 minutes to spare before the Team England Lure Trials began, I hate being late for anything let alone the trials. After a mad rush and a broken rod tip ( don’t ask) I was in the boat with my new boat partner Jan Munnick. In the rush of meeting each other we decided to head to the western part of the lake at hook end where we had heard of good reports of Pike being caught on the lure.
We had great weather sunny spells and overcast periods with a pleasant breeze to help up drift around the swims.
Having arrived late and rushed to our spot I had not tied on any lures onto my rods as I was driving the boat. I went with the following combination to search the water 32 gram yellow holo DaBush spinnerbait on my Quantum Exo medium heavy rod, 15cm Quantum battleshad in Moonshine on my Quantum Smoke heavy rod, 3.5inch Zoom swimming fluke in smoke on my wife’s Quantum Lady Like drop shot rod ( it is a very good rod) and finally a heavy jerkbait. In my mind this combination of lures would allow me to cover water the best to locate the fish. We decided we would focus on finding the Pike as this would award us double points as a posed to focusing on trout and perch. When I say double points this competition was based on having the longest length of fish in total and how this was scored is every cm of length would = 1point therefore 1cm of length on a pike would = 2 points
Fishing started slow and then started to improve during the day, Jan caught two decent jacks in quick succession and after a move too what would be our prime spot I caught two jacks in quick succession. What was now apparent was of the 4 fish landed 3 of them had been caught on the spinnerbaits that were cast parallel to the tree lines. The pike were lying in wait in the tree lines and snapping up our lures as they came past. We moved to our third area where Jan landed another jack and shortly after this I landed a lovely brown trout of about 3.5lb which I safely released after landing it. What was frustrating for most of the day was we had a lot of follows with the pike not committing to taking our lures and when they were both Jan and I lost fish as they were not properly hooked as they were taking the lures under our rod tips. Day one ended with Jan leading the day with 4 Pike I was in 4th with 2 pike and one brown trout. It was evident that the other anglers had focused on trout and perch as Bewl is a recognised drop shot venue.
For day two of the Team England Lure Trials at Bewl Jan and I agreed we would fish our prime spot where we had the day before lost a couple of fish and I had recognised a lot of activity on the sonar between 15 and 18ft of water. The weather on day two was very different the wind had picked up making it hard to drift at a suitable pace and the clouds had moved in. I started the day with my usual positive mind set but that quickly changed as on one of my very first casts with my lucky bait from the day before, Jan and I did not communicate well and Jan had cast out behind me and on my back swing my line which was 17lb Quantum Quattron fluro coated line caught on Jan’s braid and inevitably cut the line when I pulled forward to cast. I remember seeing my lure flying towards the hot spot and and watching my Exo reel scream into a giant birds nest 🙁 as you could understand we had just arrived at our key spot and my key rod had key bait were out of action it was frustrating. Whilst I was sorting out my reel and cutting the massive birds nest out Jan hooked a decent fish off the key spot. We were on the board for the day. We had to make a couple of drifts over our spot as the wind was pulling us over our key spot too quickly. We over came this challenge by making longer drifts over our spots. As the day went on It was apparent it was going to be a harder day with the weather and the fish not biting at regularly as on day one.
The day ended with Jan landing another 4 fish and I landing 2 we had several follows during the day but could just not convert anymore. All in all the weekend was a good weekend I had gained a new fishing buddie, and did what I loved doing and thats catch fish on the lure.
