Notice, not Lockdown Day 58…..On Monday of last week the Welsh Government ‘relaxed’ their lockdown rules by allowing citizens to exercise more than once a day. WTF?? I don’t exercise once a year, let alone once per day. At the same time, they simultaneously tightened the travelling requirement so that exercise had to start and end at your front door. Which at the time slightly failed the ‘so what?’ test. But then on Wednesday they stated that angling was an outdoors recreational activity and should be encouraged to prevent us from all turning into mass murderers. But, of course, you had to start and end at your front door. In other words, you could fish, but had to walk or cycle to the venue……….
To their credit, Angling Cymru did revert to the Welsh Government and point out that the majority of anglers these days would be hard pressed to walk to the end of their drive pushing their gear, let alone their local venue. After no small amount of confusion, partly fuelled by the BBC, NRW and some senior Police Officers holding an apposite view, eventually by Monday just past it became universally accepted that it was OK to drive locally to fish. And, to be fair (again) to Angling Cymru, their directions were quite specific. You could drive but only to your local venue. You should not drive past another venue to get to your favourite venue.
That left me in a fairly privileged position. From my house, if I go West along Lighthouse Road the first venue is Peterstone Lakes. Or I can still go West but along the A48 which brings me to Hendre Lake (currently shut) or if I turn off right Cefn Mably Lakes. And if I head East along the M4 I then come to the Newport AA ponds at Bettws. And if I headed North I would be passing the Pontymister Canal (in case anyone is wondering, if I turn South I drown. Lighthouse Road is a clue). So it sort of works well, because these would be my venue choices in a non-Covid-19 world.
Faced with such a wealth of options, I naturally headed off to the cheapest option which was actually open, i.e. the Newport ponds, specifically Morgans. Access via the pedestrian gate only, fishing from even numbered pegs only. Fair enough. Although neither lake was particularly busy, the peg restriction meant that when I got to Morgans I had to continue round and eventually drop in on peg 6, someway away from my favoured pegs, which are 16, 15 and….err….that’s it actually 15 or 16. But peg 6 has the much needed pandocks to its right, so I set to it on the tip with a 4 square Drennan gripmesh and corn on a size 12 Tubertini series 18 to 0.12, i.e. basically business as usual. The only slight deviation was the corn. Double or triple dead red would have been my first choice but I’d managed to grab a bag of dead pinkies not dead reds. In my defence, I actually had everything else I needed, which is amazing giving the lay-off.
Third chuck I managed to miss a proper take on the corn (ring rusty? just plain stupid? Discuss…) and then a few casts later I had a proper straight rodder and when I picked up I’d been smashed. So, excellent start. After that it was r..e…a…l…l..y s…l…o…w…and it was probably just as well that I was enjoying the novelty of being out and fishing. Now I have something of a hate-tolerate relationship with corn. I’ve actually caught a lot of fish on Hendre using it, but I’ve never had much, if any, success at Morgans, or most other venues for that matter. And please never ask me about the Wye. So I switched from corn to double caster which at least got me a small Roach, so a fish in the (virtual) net.
But the caster wasn’t overwhelming either, so I switched to a tipped dendra. Different world. Two decent Bream back to back, a pause while they regrouped, then another pair back to back, then a further seven, plus two Skimmers over the space of the next 2 hours or so. So 11 proper Bream including a couple of the old black ones, probably pushing 30Lbs, decent’ish sort of day out. No catch shot of course, no keepnets allowed at the moment. I had hoped if I released each Bream carefully by the platform that they might hang around until the end so that I could get a photo, but no chance. And, before you ask, I’m fairly certain that I did catch at least 10 different fish, but there was one that may have sneaked in twice.
Long way to go yet, both in terms of the UK and regional response to the pandemic (fuck up is the term that springs to mind) and angling, where I have to consider both the progression in England wrt matches being allowed, and the progression in Wales wrt being able to drive far enough to participate in said matches. We shall see!
26 Year ITCH 