After several false starts Lee, our eldest son, made it down from his home in Edinburgh for a few days and a chance to have a complete break and for us go fishing together.
We started off at the local reservoir, Darracott, for a couple of hours float fishing from the dam in the evening. We always have a friendly match and tonight’s goal was to catch the most species and if tied, then the biggest bream would be the decider.
I started off well with roach and skimmer before Lee got into his swing. We both bagged three species each, I had the larger bream, but Lee had the most fish and lost a carp at the net so he said he had the moral victory. The best fish of the night without question was a beautiful rudd that Lee took late on which just topped the pound mark. Without doubt, rudd are one of our most beautiful freshwater fish.
The next day we changed swims and fished on the near side at the shallow end of the water. I said I would try for bream on the swing tip, Lee opted to float fish again. I used bread crumb flavoured with marmite in my feeder and fished with corn and spam. The fish started coming slowly and by the end of the night I was getting a bite every throw, although as I rarely use a hook smaller than a size 12, I missed the bites from the smaller fish. Lee struggled and had just three fish, a perch on a worm he found, a bream and a roach. I had bream, rudd and roach although nothing much over 1lb.
Typical of Lee, he demanded a rematch on the next night so we went to the same place but the results were reversed. I managed seven fish including rudd, bream and perch but Lee had a bagful having changed his float rig to a much lighter, more balanced set up.
So over our three short sessions, honours were just about even. Lee had to fly out of Bristol on the following evening so we decided to go early for a showdown on the Bristol Avon at Lacock to decide the winner.
We arrived just after lunchtime; the worst time of the day, and fished with spam and meatballs after the chub and barbel. I could feel repeated taps from small fish having chosen to touch leger, and after a quiet start caught a dace on spam!!. After that, although knocks were plentiful, we didn’t catch our big deciding fish although I claimed the prize for the dace.
He is down again in October when we fish the Wye so the grudge match will be resumed then.