Monday 16th May - 7th visit to the Bristol Feeder Canal

After sorting my fishing gear out on Sunday I was keen to get back on the bank and particularly on this fantastic venue. Usual early rise to get parked and was in my chosen swim by 06:45. I had to mix the ground bait up from scratch so after sorting out two rigs for fishing the track (12 meters out) as well as setting up a light Feeder Rod I did not start fishing until just after 07:45. I was in Central Bay again so was hoping for a few bream today.
I adopted a positive approach and cupped in 6 big balls with plenty of caster and hemp and left it to settle. Starting off with a small cage feeder with liquidised bread and a big piece of flake on a 14 cast into the bay and about 2 meters from the brick wall of the far bank i intended to give it an hour re-casting every 5 minutes.
20 minutes in I had a big drop back and hit it. At first it did not feel that big but by half way across the fish started to resist and I could see it was a decent skimmer of around 2 lbs as it came near the surface. Happy days I thought but apart from a few rattles that was it on the tip.
The sun became quite bright an hour in and the reflection of the corrugated wall of the warehouse opposite made it difficult to see the float, red or yellow top it did not make that much difference, to make things worse my eyes started to water.  The sun eventually moved around after 20 minutes and the eyes dried up. I had been striking at odd dips of the float and did manage a few dace on maggot but they were not very big.
I decided to re-feed and this brought instant results in the shape of a roach around 1lb 4 - 6 ozs. More roach followed falling to single or double caster and holding back slightly in the slow tow towards the City.

My best roach

Switching hook baits between caster and maggot I kept the fish coming for the next couple of hours. I  then had a visitor in the shape of Tony Rixon from Veals who had come down to have a look to see how I was getting on, I know he has been following the posts on the Feeder with keen interest. While Tony was there I did not catch that much but he could see how the fish were responding once ground bait was cupped in.
About an hour after Tony went team mate Ian Hudson came down while he was passing through the area. I did catch quite well while Ian was there and he was keen to have a go himself so we are arranging an outing in the near future.

Just over 12lbs in total

Next outing is Thursday evening on the Bristol City Docks 'knock up' then Gloucester Canal on Sunday.