River Welland Stamford 15th Feb

Well its been a very long time since I last shared my exploits with you so apologies for my absence but in my defence I have been though the mill recently. Hopefully that is all behind me now and I can get on with my life and of course, the fishing.
So with the weather on Sunday not to bad for the time of year I decided to have a short session on the Stamford Meadows section of the river Welland.
On arriving at the river it had a lovely green tinge to it but it was hardly moving at all so I wasn't sure how things wood pan out. Having very rarely fished this section before I decided to head to the downstream end of the stretch and away from most of the people that were about enjoying the pleasant afternoon sunshine.

A lovely Green tinge or what...

 

The river at this point was about 14m wide and after a few minutes spent plumbing around I had about 5ft of water mid river with slightly more on the inside. I had very little in the way of bait with me but this included a small amount of liquidised bread, some ground bait and a few old pinkies. So it was to be bread down the middle then and with a 0.5g Drennan Roach pattern  float and size 20 hook at the business end I set about trying to snare a few of the local inhabitants. It wasn't too long before the float buried out of sight yielding a small Roach of about an once which didn't come as a surprise as there are plenty of small Roach in the river.

Anyway bites and fish were coming steadily throughout the first hour and I thought I would try double Pinkie just in case the Roach would prefer a live offering. Well I can tell you here and now that next put in the float went under but I had missed the bite or did I.......WTF! 
It was however no missed bite but in fact a Minnow that had somehow managed to get one of the Pinkies and the hook into its tiny mouth.

 

 

A WTF or sometimes called a Minnow



 

 

I gave it a couple more runs with Pinkie and only managed 2 micro Dace to show for my efforts and so went back onto the punch and in an effort to avoid these really small fish. This was all that was needed to see the Roach return and the stamp of fish started to improve, I had a good last hour or so and included a few fish close to the pound mark.
Anyway things came to a natural conclusion as I ran out of Liquidised bread and with no feed going in the bites dried up.

All in all it was a pleasant short session with a few pounds in the net and some cracking Roach from this often overlooked venue. 
Cheers Mark