It may sound silly, but considering I am seventeen years old and I have been fishing since I was three, this trip was going to be my first solo night trip. I have night fished before but I had always gone with my dad or my brother.
As this was going to be my first night trip I was really looking forward to it. I was going to one of my local pits called Bradwell Lake; it is water of about twenty-three acres in size. It has a good head of bream and tench with a handful of hard fighting carp thrown in to make it interesting. I had fished the lake before with my dad and brother and we had done quite well, landing carp to fifteen pounds, bream to over ten pounds and tench to seven pounds.
I like to fish the method, which allows me to catch a variety of species. My hook link usually consists of Gamma fluorocarbon or Pallatrax Steamlink. My hook size varies depending on my hook bait, or whether I need to bully the fish in or not. I like to keep my rigs simple (see the step by step photo-tutorial guide in the hot tips section of the website) fishing these rigs has caught me hundreds fish, so I don’t try and over complicate things. For a method feeder I use a Stonze weight, my method mix sticks to them because they are slightly porous. There are several advantages to using the Stonze, You can flavour them and the fish are definitely not scared of Stonze
For my mainline I use 10lb Gamma Copolymer because it is simply the best all round mono line I have ever used.
I arrived at the lake at 6pm on a Wednesday evening and carted all my gear, which didn’t quite include the kitchen sink!, to my desired swim. I chose the swim because it offered me a wide range of fishing options; weed close in to the edge, with patchy gravel and silt areas. I was fishing with three rods using the method that would cover all these areas. I positioned my left-hand rod in a hole in the marginal weed, this was mainly targeting tench. My middle rod was cast to a gravel bar seventy yards out. This rod was targeting the bream and the carp. My right hand rod was going to be cast around randomly and at showing fish.
I knew from past experience that it worked to bait the gravel bar quite heavily. So I made up a spod mix consisting of pigeon conditioner, hemp, scalded trout pellet, sweetcorn and a very small amount of groundbait.
Also I have found it pays to add some of your hook bait to the mix so the fish get used to finding what you want them to eat, like maggots or boilies. I put about thirty large spods over my middle rod in an area about the size of half a tennis court. This gives the fish a nice sized area to graze on. With my left-hand rod I was just trying to pick off passing fish so I did not bait the area heavily. My right hand rod had no additional baiting only the method ball that I would cast out. Because I had quite small food objects in my spod mix I used small hook baits to match them, ten millimetre boilies, sweetcorn, plastic sweetcorn, maggots an small pop-ups.
I sat up that night for as long as I could so that I could watch the water and listen for any signs of fish. A few fish topped over my baited area, which looked like bream, so I sat on my bed chair feeling quite confident. At around about midnight my right hand rod bleeped. I looked at my bobbin and it was moving up and down slowly. I’d got a bite from a bream but because it was in the weed it was not moving off. With a bit of persuasion I soon had a bream of about six pounds in my net. It was not a big bream by the lakes standard, but it was the first fish I’d caught during a night session on my own. I was happy to catch the fish, but trying to cast back into a three-foot hole in the weed in the dark was quite tricky.
Unfortunately, I did not get another bite until four-thirty the next morning, when I lost a right slab of a bream at the edge of the weed bed. I put this down to trying to lift its head over the weed and I was just pulling too hard. The second time I lost a fish doing the same thing I had to ask myself what I was doing wrong. I decided that I was probably using too small a hook. I was using a size 12 hook, so I changed over to a size 10. As dawn was breaking, I decided to stay up and concentrate on my fishing. It is a lot easier to recast into tricky spots when you can actually see what you are doing!
I like to be accurate when casting andI hit the same spot every time, so I use the line clip on my reel. To achieve this I cast out to the distance I want, take three steps back, and put my line in the line clip. This allows the fish to take line off the reel before it hits the clip. If not your line could break or your rod might get dragged in. About two hours after first light I started to see some activity over my baited area. I decided to recast my rods and I had a bite as soon as my bait hit the bottom. This confirmed to me that I was on the fish.
That day from five in the morning till midday I caught three bream and three tench, smashing my personal best tench of 7lb 7oz with a stunning 8lb 10oz beauty.
I also had a bream that levelled my personal best of 9lb 14oz All the tench came from my rod cast in the hole in the weed and, to be honest, that is what I expected. The bites from the bream came from my heavily baited area. So the tactics I employed paid off.
Because of the early success on two of my rods I decided to re-bait both of the areas. I put twenty spods back over my middle rod and re-baited my left-hand rod lightly again. Doing this completely killed the swims, but I was confident that the fish would move back eventually. While I was waiting for the swim to kick back off I noticed fish rolling to my right at about forty-yards out. So I re-cast my roving rod and cast it right in the middle of the rolling fish. A couple of hours passed without a touch on any of my rods, then my roving rod produced a tench of about 6lb. Just as I was slipping it back, my middle rod got a bite, finally the fish were back on my baited area.
I caught bream and the odd tench steadily for the rest of the day and all through the night. During the night I had a screaming run of what I thought was a carp. The fish went on several powerful runs before I got it in close enough to see it. I was hoping it was a carp because the way it fought it would have been a big one. To my surprise it was a catfish which pulled the scales around to 19lb.
Exceptionally good fun on light tackle. By the morning I had banked 13 bream and 7 tench and the cat. Needless to say, I did not get much sleep but I did not mind after the night that I just had. Most of the bream ranged from 6 to 9 lbs and the tench from 5 to 7lbs.
After the success of my first night, was not expecting my trip to get any better. I was ecstatic with the fish I had already caught. But while I was taking pictures of the catfish I’d caught during the night my middle rod roared off. As I struck into the fish I was debating what it was. I ruled out a bream because it was fighting too hard, so I assumed it was a small carp. But when I lifted its head I realised it was a big tench, which are my favourite species. So I started to panic. I just thought it was going to fall off as the fish was going crackers in the edge. But I finally landed the fish. It pulled the scales round to a very respectable 9lb 10oz. My dad was there to take the pictures right away so we could get the fish back in the water as quickly as possible.
This fish topped off an already fantastic couple of days, which I will always remember. In the end I banked 22 bream, 9 tench and a catfish. This session proved to me that you don’t need to overcomplicate things to bag up. Give it a go and I hope it works for you. It certainly does for me.