Rising Waters

College Pool was the intended starting point for my closed season tour of Leamington AA's stillwaters, accompanied by Brian on this occasion. I was taken aback by the scene we found on our arrival.

Almost the entire left hand side of the pool was out of bounds due to flooding. The water has now spilled out well into the adjacent field. A peg near the car park might be fishable, albeit a long way back from the permanent peg. The right hand side of the pool is fishable though, but pretty much from the path only for its entire length and it's all very muddy and squelchy.

We'd been beaten to the pool by 3 other anglers in the same party who had spread themselves out across the length of the pool to get the best of the pegs (those with the most space between the water line and the hedge behind!). Rather than jumping in amongst them and suffering the inevitable mudfest, we chose to head off to Snitterfield Reservoir.

I thought it would be tough and so it proved. Bites were hard to come by and the rain that dogged us for a large part of the day did little to improve our state of mind. Mick the bailiff said that it had been hard going recently (or words to that effect!) and that he hadn't expected to find any idiots anglers on site today. We'd been the only takers all week apparently.

Light gear, careful feeding and floats dotted right down to a plip were the order of the day. I worked hard for a few Roach up to 6oz, some small Perch and a Skimmer of around a pound. It was more than I thought I'd get if I'm honest and things will surely improve as the conditions warm up - it's anyone's guess when that will happen! The week ahead doesn't look great either...