Working on the basis of doing things differently I started off in a swim I usually end up in at dusk. One bait in the 'hotspot', one chucked the the site of a lily bed and the third under a drifter float.
It's not often I get a favourable wind for drifting other than over open water so I haven't had much chance to try the float I made a year or two back. It's based on the Colin Dyson design from way back when. The idea being to have a float which I could swap from my bottom end floats when float-legering. In place of the two map pins which the original used as a clip at the top of the float's body I have a line clip from a bobbin. The stem is a bit of broken rod tip, the vane a plastic loyalty card or something covered in dayglo gaffer tape and rod varnish! There's a swivel attached to the end of the carbon stem by some glue-filled shrink tube.
To swap from float-legering to drifting I swap the bottom end float for the drifter, unclip the lead and clip from the top of the trace, and put three very big split shot on the trace wire. For drifting small waters the set-up works well. At least it drifts the bait. I didn't find out how the pike react to it.
Although the drifting exercise proved fishless it did find me a feature I wasn't aware of when the bait ran aground. So the time spent wasn't wasted.
No fish bay seemed as good a place as anywhere. Like a fool I didn't fish the bank where the wind would have been off my back but the opposite side. Although the air temp was high the wind had picked up and its chill factor had too. Everything was looking good for a run or two at dusk, or maybe into dark. But it wasn't to be.
Apart from robins singing and chasing early on and the occasional chinking of a great tit suggesting spring might be approaching there was little in the way of bird activity. Ducks, coots and grebes weren't in evidence on the water. They were either skulking in the reeds or roosting in the snag trees. Little waterfowl activity often seems to go hand in hand with an absence of pike from the landing net. No fish bay lived up to its name and I gave up on the idea of stopping a whole hour into dark watching the starlights on my floats.
