Lucky git.
Just a quick post to let you know a couple of things….
1. As you can see Roman has been out in Africa catching sailfish. In his own words – “I caught a sailfish today, woohoo, pretty boss creature, no double figure barbel though ;]”. Details and more pics in the new year.
2. A reminder that the last day for Christmas orders is the 17th of December. That means that if you want your order to arrive for Christmas you need to order BEFORE the end of the 17th (that is this coming Saturday).
The first of my two pike for the day.
As followers of our twitter feed will know, it’s been a tough few weeks for me fishing wise. Last week I tried to take advantage of some mild weather and search out some barbel – but ended up with only a solitary chub to show for my efforts. The week before I’d had my piking ruined by river work being carried out upstream, dropping the water level by a foot or so and then sending down an hours worth of solid weed. So it was really nice to return to the same spot and get a result in the form of two fighting fit double figure Itchen pike.
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The smile says it all.
It was a Saturday afternoon in August, I was in the middle of moving house. Taking a break for lunch I looked at my phone, 4 missed calls and 3 texts and a voicemail all from Roman – which normally means only one thing, he’s caught a fish, normally a big one. I didn’t get time to read the texts, or listen to the voicemail because at that moment my phone started to ring again – the reason of course is the fish pictured above. In his own words, here’s Roman’s account of it’s capture…
“Having spent practically all summer fishing the Thames, it was time to devote some time to the Wey – given that it was infact closer to home than the old father. An afternoon reccie with my mate mark turned up some previously unfished water with any number of tasty looking barbel swims, until finally we hacked our way to a spot downstream of a fallen tree entering the inside margin. As we clambered down a large grey shape drifted away from our commotion but I just caught a glimpse of the deep dark shape gliding off underneath the snag. “That would be a carp then”, I remarked to my mate – interesting as the Wey has no great repute for the species.
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Be sure to order by the 17th of December!
Well piles of uni work have kept us from updating the blog as much as we’d like in the last few weeks. But we’ve got a bit more free time on our hands again now, so there are some cracking updates coming up in the near future from our exploits over the summer and hopefully I’ll get out and do a bit of fishing too (there are some big roach and grayling nearby with my name all over them).
However this post isn’t about all that! It’s to let you know that if you want to order t-shirts in time for Christmas then you need to do it by the 17th of December – otherwise we can’t guarantee you’ll have them under the tree come Christmas morning.
As the weather gets colder, the pike action warms up.
The nights are drawing in, summer is officially over and it won’t be long before Winter is upon us! But it’s not all doom and gloom, many of the fish we target will soon be in top condition and at top weights. It’s also time to get piking! With this in mind we headed down to the Dorset Stour for a day piking – joined for the day by Mr Daniel Holden.
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12lb 12oz - Roman's new river Itchen barbel record.
I had spent some time fishing for the river Itchen barbell at the back end of last season, but with virtually no success. I returned to find that the fish had moved little from the snag where they were located before – and the first session produced a brace of eights, which was pleasing. However I could see larger fish within the shoal competing with their smaller mates for the bait-droppered pellet. The chub were also proving annoying at times, snaffling the bait first and running around the swim – spooking everything in sight.
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Roman with his new river Itchen barbel record of 12lb 12oz.
As we had confirmed to us the late last week, Roman’s fish has been accepted as the river Itchen record at 12lb 12oz. You can find it on the list HERE. We’ve also got the underwater shots from whilst the barbel was recovering in the margins. The whole day was pretty damn good and we’ll have the full video and pics online in the near future.
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