Somewhere different today. I got a call in the week to guest on an Excel AC match at Alveschurch Fisheries. I’d never been to the venue before however I had seen plenty of match results on Facebook, so looked forward to fishing somewhere new.

The weather forecast wasn’t great with rain and drizzle forecasted for the day but only a moderate breeze but this pretty much ruled out fishing to the far Island as the wind was cutting from left to right but at least the wind was blowing up to my end of the pool, so I hoped for a nice days fishing.

The plan was to fish maggots down the track and soft pellets short, plus the left and right margins which plumbed up great. I started down the track loose feeding a few maggots with the view to catch silvers first, building up the swim and then hopefully catching Carp and F1’s later in the day. I’d seem plenty of Facebooks posts on how good the fishing can be but this was now proper winter fishing with lots a cold rain over the previous few days going into the pool and the day turned out to be a tough one for all.

It was a slow day bites wise. No silvers were feeding, I only caught one Roach all day which was strange considering I was fishing maggots so I cut my feeding right back and began moving around the peg, opening up different lines looking for the odd carp. I managed to catch 8 small carp doing this which went 25lb 9oz plus the one solitary 9oz Roach I caught early on which surprisingly was enough to claim 2nd place in the match !!

So my first time visit to Alveschurch wasn’t good. There was several dry nets and very low weighs recorded but I liked the venue and I will be back in the Summer.

Best Rig of the day

This was a 4 x 12 Preston F1 maggot in 5 foot of water set up on 0.17mm mainline with strung no.9 and no.10 shot above a size 18 (0.11mm) 6 inch Preston SFL Ready rig with Preston 11 dura slip elastic through a short stop kit.