Kennet and Avon canal, Devizes

This was another session that didn't go quite as planned or hoped. Mark and myself had arranged to meet Ken Rayner and Tim Suttle at the canal for a little friendly knock up and a chance to see if the big fish had woken up from their winter slumber yet.
We had hoped to fish a pound at the top of the Cain hill locks called Curries but during the week preceding we discovered that the pound had been virtually drained out, probably for maintenance. The decision was made to head to the bottom of Cain hill and fish one of the last pounds called fox hangers.

On arrival at the canal it actually looked in quite good shape with a nice bit of colour that left us all feeling confident of a few fish. A hastily arranged draw saw Ken sit himself down on the end peg nearest the upper lock gate, next in line was Tim with a jungle opposite then there was me and finally Mark had the downstream end peg, with a huge sum of £1 each thrown into the pot things could get interesting.

The pounds at the bottom of Cain hill are noted for the number of carp that reside in them, particularly the pound above where we were fishing so we were all aiming to target the carp in our approaches.

For me this meant fish the bomb and pellet or corn against the far bank for the Carp. On the pole I decided to fish 2 lines, the first at 9m where I was feeding groundbait and pinkie for the small silvers, and a longer line at 14.5m feeding pellet and corn mainly for the skimmers but hoping the odd carp may venture away from the far bank .
I started by cupping in a couple of balls of groundbait with pinkie and a pinch of caster at 9m, then a ball of fishmeal groundbait with some pellet in at 14.5m then left these to settle and cast the lead over to the far bank and sat back in anticipation.
The first sign that something wasn't quite right came from Tim who is an accomplished canal angler. He had started on a bread line at 3m, and after 5Min's hadn't had the slightest indication of any fish let alone a bite. As Tim put it, you know things are going to be rock hard when you can't get an immediate response on the bread.

During this time Mark had like me been fishing the lead near to the far bank and had been getting plenty of liners to show that there were fish in his peg but had failed to get and proper bites. After half an hour of this he decided to drop in on his long pole line to see if the liners were coming from fish over his pellet. And immediate response from a small skimmer made us think that the fish had moved over the pellet but alas it was just a solitary fish.

A couple of hours into the session it was evident that something wasn't right, the canal looked OK but we had caught about 10 fish between the 4 of us. I think we all knew that for some reason the fish didn't want to feed at all and that we had probably killed our swims dead with our initial feed. Meanwhile Mark latched into what appeared to be a carp on the pole and carefully played it for about 5 Min's before the fish made a last ditch bid for freedom going under his keepnet at his feet and breaking him. On such a hard day, I did find myself feeling slightly sorry for him but that only lasted a couple of seconds because the main task on any day's fishing is to batter Mark and it would have made that impossible if he'd landed that fish.

Another hour or so passed in which we all managed to put a couple of small fish in the net but then the next calamity struck.
Tim was only able to stay until about 1pm because he wanted to get back to watch the footie, so he packed up and left way before us. Shortly after he left Mark phone rang, it was Tim apparently our cars had been locked in by the landowner. As we understood it we were OK to park where we had met, but it turned out that it wasn't OK and the landowner had got the hump and decided to lock the gates and was threatening to get the cars towed away.

Luckily Mark is both a big chap and a very good diplomat, he trotted on down the towpath to have a chat with the landowner and after half an hour of discussions the chap relented and unlocked the gate giving us a reasonable amount of time to pack up our stuff and get going.
This was an unfortunate end to the day but it did save us the embarrassment of weighing in, Ken did weigh his net and had just over 3lb of bits. I would estimate that my net wasn't any better and Mark tipped back about 4 skimmers and a couple of small perch. Much to Kens disappointment we called the result void as we didn't get to finish fishing properly.