Saturday 4th October

[Lewis Mottram]

I woke up to the sound of my alarm at 8am saturday morning. Had a cup of tea and got washed etc. At 8:30am, i went into my garage and got my bait(maggots,casters,sweetcorn,hemp seed and pellets) out of the little bait fridge i have and put them in my bag, i checked i had all my gear and i set off to my mates house to pick him up. We gt there about 9:15 and we loaded all his gear into the back of the car. We were heading for 'non go bye' fisheries just past Leeds/Bradford airport. It took us about 20 minutes to get there. When we arrived, we unloaded all our gear out of the car and both decided to fish on the top lake (there are 4 lakes in all). As we were looking for a good place to put our chairs and tackle up, we saw a few people catching some roach and carp, and we were dying to get fishing. We both found platforms next to each other and out of the wind, and began to tackle up. I was using a pole and i was going to just fish down the margins because i knew i would be able to get bites there, my friend callum, was using stick float method. I put my chair down, got all my bait ready (put out some lose feed of Hemp seed and casters to get the fish going) and tackled up. it was about 10ish now, and i was ready for my first 'ship out' with my pole. I started off on a size 16 barbed hook, with a single red caster as my bait. Within a minute of putting my bait out there, the float was already bodding up and down. I waited patiently till the float had gone fully under. I was into my first fish, it was only a little roach of about 2 oz but at least i wasn't going to blank :). It got to about 11:30 and i had had about another 10 small roach. ( i was disappointed i hadn't had a carp yet but i think with the drop in temperature the few days before it would be nearly impossible to get one). I concentrated on the roach, and non go bye is full of them. At around 12:30 i got my best roach of the day, it was about 1lb, which is not a bad size for a roach. My mate callum, who was fishing maggot has a few fish in the net and we carried on fishing. It started to rain but it was only spitting and thankfully, it only lasted about 10 minutes. As the day went on, i kept having success in the margins (i was only fishing about 6 ft away from me). It got to about 2, and the roach bites had dried up a little bit, so i decided to get more of my pole out and fish with a 6m of pole straight out infront of me, i had been baiting that area up for about 15 minutes with Hemp,Caters and the odd bit of sweet corn. I got my pole roller set up and i put my bait out there. Within 5 minutes i had another roach, about 12oz, and a couple of little ones.By this time, the wind had picked up quite abit and it was starting to get very hard to hold the pole out there, so i decided to just go down the margins again and see what would happen. I tried the maggot and had a few more roach and i had a little perch, which i was surprised at because there isnt that many perch at 'non go bye'. The bites dried up so i went back on caster. Had a few more perch, some about 8oz. At about 3pm, i hooked into a fish that got the elastic going, i thought it was going to be a little carp because it was fighting very well, but i was a roach about 10oz foul hooked in the tail. I decided to go for a carp before i had to go, so i kept feeding sweetcorn about 8-10 feet out infront of me whilst i was fishing down the edge. With about 15 minutes left of the day, i went back out there with a piece of sweet corn as bait and tried for a little carp, but nothing happened, i was abit disappointed i hadn't got a carp but also glad because i had about 30 roach and 1 little perch, not a bad days fishing. :-)