Dace Decider

Kev invited me out for a days fishing for Wednesday. I found out about the arrangement on Tuesday night on arrival home from Compton Verney when Judy announced I was, "going fishing tomorrow with Kev, he'll be round at nine for you."

Cool. Not arguing!

Luckily Danny had deposited all his left over maggots in my bait box at the end of the Compton Verny session; at least a pint of mixed white and red, just perfect for the trip which I guessed would be a session on the Avon at Saxon Mill after either roach or dace.

It was. We decided to target the dace and moved above the mill to occupy the first few swims above the cabbages where the big dace shoals seem to live all the year around. The whole place was overgrown with nettles as high as your head, the club having not bothered to clear a path to them let alone maintain bank side comfort during close season - a whole mile of bank completely out of access then, and just as I like it, wild and wayward.

We beat a path with our bank sticks and then cleared a couple of the regular pegs of dense nettles and proceeded to fish on. My first fish was a very respectable dace of five ounces. The second was one just a tad smaller. A very promising start as I have found from prior experience on this stretch that if you manage to fish in just the right swim then you won't have nearly so many fish as the next peg down will provide but will have the bigger fish to play with, which is a good tradeoff, I think.

I hoped that the relative size of the fish would increase as it had done on my very first discovery of the dace shoals back in December last. Then, I had started out with four ounce fish and fished on for only an hour or so but eventually topped out at seven ounces, a personal best fish, just after dark.

I was looking to sat a new PB now, but unfortunately it wasn't to be. The dace on this occasion slowly shrank in both weight and frequency as the sun rose high in the sky and I struggled to put together a net of just a few pounds of small chub, tiny, tiny roach and dace over the half day we fished. I never exceeded the first five ouncer. Kev fared far better in the total weight stakes, fishing the waggler in a peg alive with smaller dace, doubling my weight without any fish near the size of the few larger fish I'd managed to put together early doors, so, on this occasion it must be conceded that the match angler instinct wins the day...

Well done Kev!