I’ve never really been one for lake fishing, but I’ve been giving it a go lately… As you all know I’m more of a rivers man than anything but Kieron Jenkins a good mate of mine said we would have a day out on the boat for a change. I’ve always fished the banks for trout and never the boat so it was something new to me and I was quite excited to give it a bash to tell the truth…

We arrived in Coventry, just a few miles outside of Draycote, we made our way into Dunchurch to the GreenMan pub for breaky. Just after 9am we arrived at the water and made our way from the tackle shop to the water where we were making our first drift of the day. Kieron gave me an Airflo Di 3 sweep with 2 blobs on a cast around 16 ft. The point fly was a black and green blob and the top dropper was something a little more colourful. It did however take a little time to get used to the long leader with two fluffy birds on the cast 🙂 As we set the drogue, Kie explained that I had to find the depth that which the fish were feeding or settled at by counting the fly line down, 5, 10, 15 seconds and so on. The retrieve was a mixture of figure of eights to fish the flies slow or faster, pulling if they are aggressive.  As the first drift was under way my first cast I counted down 10 seconds and started to pull quickly in short bursts. Seconds later the line locked up and and I struck into the first fish of the day, a lovely overwintered rainbow and god they can fight! Much stronger than anything in the river for it’s size, I loved ever seconds of it…

For the rest of the drift there were fish coming out everywhere, kie just went to town on me taking 8 fish to my lonely 2… all within 10 minutes! It was great to watch, you see nothing like that on a river. We went back through the same drift taking a few more and then decided to go look somewhere else, boats seemed to just ‘appear’ after we netted a few fish and were drifting pretty close behind us.

Kieron decided to go right up the top end of the lake to the shallow waters to give the buzzers a blast. It wasnt long and he was working his magic by taking a load on the brightest buzzer ive ever seen :O I wasnt doing too bad with a few good size trout to the boat, all be them stockies but what else do you expect this time of year? By this time i started to get the hang of it. I watched Kie cast hell of a long line across to a huge bush over hanging the waters edge, as he pulled the slack line to tightern up, there was a massive bow wave behind his fly… The fished must have come around 15 yards then bang, fish on! I actually said it was a whale as is breached the surface! !hat a fight and what a lump of a rainbow… It must have went over 7lb.

As the day went on we were nailing fish everywhere and it was just cracking sport, we must have had over 25+ fish each to the boat. I know it’s not always like this but what a day and what a great trip out on a boat with a good friend, I think I can see myself doing a little more of this in the future :)…. We’ve just booked a boat for opening day on Blagdon… Look out Saturday!

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