I am going to stop mentioning the weather as the weather gods are not happy with me! Following the thunder and lightning at Viaduct we then get a period of red hot temperatures plus more thunderstorms! Basically June the 16th came, that magical day with the opening of the river season, so what did I do… I didn’t go fishing! Experience has told me the first day on the river is never great but allied to that we have a river that is very low with hardly any flow and bright sunlight – a blank waiting to happen so I opted out and then the real hot period struck!. Yes I could have gone but these days I don’t deal with the hot weather in this country very well – China and Thailand seem to be no issue????

So my latter part of June has been curtailed to just one short visit to High Penn on the 28th. I had decided to set out to fish every peg during the season and as such set up on the west bank second peg in. I took my pole and fished 9:30 to 11:10 but the day did not start well with my 10m and 11.5m sections being jammed inside one another so it was 9m or not at all. No photos for this session and I had left my keepnet at home due to the hot weather so aimed to put any fish back asap. So plumbing up at 9m was just as it got deeper, I needed another section at least to be comfortably in the deeper area but that was not going to happen!

Fishing with a 1g Paster on 0.12mm to 0.10mm to an 18 with the bulk set 18 inches from the hook and a dropper 6 inches away from the hook I began with two balls of groundbait mixed fairly firm to try and get down past the rudd laced with chopped worm. Hook bait was double maggot and predictably the first fish was a rudd, after a couple more some perch appeared, switching to worm I had a roach and a micro perch at which point I thought to myself -“lets try something different”. I had in the past bought a series of jars of what are essentially flavoured and coloured translucent jelly pellets.

I have been using the bright yellow honey flavoured ones off and on during different sessions and have caught on them so I decided to give them an hour to see how they went. Immediately first cast there were constant dips as small fish investigated. Now I have to explain that these jelly pellets are about the size of a 4mm pellet and are perfectly round but after being in water for some time expand top a 6mm size. Eventually the float buried and a rudd came to hand. Basically I ended up with 6 rudd, 6 perch and 3 roach for about 1-04. Half of the fish were caught on the jelly pellets- including the perch!

In the meantime Gareth had made one of his flying visits to Vietnam as he had some time off for the Dragon Boat Festival in China. He visited the same place as previously and between having a nap and fishing for part of the second day racked up 21 hours of fishing time and caught 21 fish.

The first session, another 6 were taken in the second shorter session.

Bait for the non-predators were either stale cake from a bakery molded around the hook or if fishing up in the water the cake was used on the float feeder and rice paper on the hook, predators were taken with fish chunks.

Must make more of my time in July!