Yours truly having built up a day’s flexi and Stu hankering to wiggle his foot long rubber sex toys in front of some Anglian Water pike combined to form a Monday mission down to Pitsford. You may have seen the perch fly I tied in preparation for this day.
Perch fly
Boy did we put the effort in, I even made some badass Chicken, Chorizo and Hot Peri Peri sauce sandwiches the night before.
Sarnies
I was awake at 4:30 am and we hit the tarmac at 6:10am to blast down the M1. Only we didn’t blast down the M1, it took nearly 4 bastard hours to get to Pitsford because of roadworks and general volume of traffic. The guy at the lodge was very helpful and advised us that the area out from the lodge was full of smaller pike whereas the main reservoir (South of the road) had fewer pike but bigger specimens.
Random picture of Pitsford Lodge
My mind raced, already I was thinking “well we’ll move out of the smaller ‘half’ of the reservoir once we’ve had our fill of jacks up to 8lb then we can concentrate on trying to catch the double figure monsters’. Silly bastard.
We worked our way down past reed beds flicking out all sorts of flies (me) and jerkbaits, soft baits, spinners, plugs etc (Stu) and had not one offer. Several drifts were had but nope, nothing. I gave up and tried soft baits as well on my big spinning rod but nope, not a thing. We fished some more areas South of the road and finally I at last had some action when a pike swam in alongside (not behind) my huge plug. The weed was a big problem though, whenever we got near shore we were forever snagging and picking up weed.
Determined to change our luck we motored through the under-road tunnel out to the main reservoir and headed for the mouth of Brixworth bay where we anchored up for a bit to fish some deep water. No luck. I then set us up on a drift parallel to the shore running down to Brixworth Woods and here, finally, I connected with a fish but only after putting on the world’s simplest lure – a big fekin silver spoon!
That stretch proved to be the perfect antidote to an otherwise slow day! I managed to hook another pike(let) which thankfully came off as it wasn’t much bigger than my spoon and we both got a few follows right up to the boat by inquisitive fish (including a big perch after Stu’s lure).
Back at the car park we got chatting to a couple of anglers from Birmingham who had been drop-shotting for Perch and it transpired one of them had previously caught a 33lb pike at Pitsford . I’m up for some of that!
P.S do not open the door to that big green portaloo behind the pontoon car park. Just don’t.
Hello, my biggest fish to today date is a pike, very nice and powerful fish. Bad luck on all the traffic, it is always the way when you are looking forward to getting somewhere. I am glad it did not ruin your day and you managed to catch some nice fish after all. Thanks