October 18th Chew Valley lake in a boat with Andy

A guy walks into the psychiatrist wearing only Clingfilm for shorts.

The shrink says, ‘Well, I can clearly see you’re nuts.’

The lake has not been fishing very well for pike since it’s opening. Sure enough there have been some good pike an even 30’s but not in the numbers of former years. The lake is very weedy and the water temperature high which might not be helping.

I meet Andy at 8 o’clock for the full breakfast in the lodge. It would appear that the fishing had improved since our last visit at the beginning of October and that static dead baits were catching the bigger fish. So I had made my mind up that it was going to be static bait fishing for me.

Andy was going to use one rod for static and use a lure rod.

We set off and tried plenty of spots around the lake using the echo sounder to find drop offs and other features. However the fishing was difficult.

I was using smelt as bait and had one pickup fairly early which resulted in a jack pike of a few pounds.

The wind started to pick up as the day progressed and at times when we moved waves splashed on the bow and over Andy as he was captain for day and at the back end of the boat. I was anchor man (labourer for the day) at the pointy end, I couldn’t understand why Andy wanted to park the boat over water 25ft deep. Only joking Andy!

The fishing was not too great. We saw few fish being caught.

Low water on Chew in Autumn

We caught a bit of rest bite from the wind by going round the back of the island. There were banks of weed where the water was 8ft deep or so and it looked as though it was good spot for the pike to patrol along. But then nothing came along.

It doesn’t matter whether you are catching or not times just belts along.

We fished a few other spots. We found one where Andy kept on getting hits on the lures only for the culprits to be rainbow trout.

Pesky trout for Andy

We moved to another spot where almost straight away we were away on a dead bait rod, again a small pike came in. Andy had a couple more pike on his big lure again all small ones.

Chew Valley in late autumn sunshine

As the daylight began to fade we needed to pack up, I started to wind in the deadbaits slowly just in case a pike is close by and guess what I had a take as I started to wind in. Again it was a small fish and we needed a torch to unhook it such was the light.

So the end score for the day was Andy 4 and me 3……….

Some boats blanked……..so it wasn’t that bad.