After you read the title of this post you may well be wondering what happened, so let me explain....
I left work bang on 4pm and headed straight to Devon as planned, I completed the Journey in a little over 4 hours which isn't too bad going for a Friday night and before I knew it I was in the pub and knocking back the first of many beers. The inevitable last orders bell was rung but the party continued onto the beach, unsuprisingly I can't remember the finer details!
This pretty much set the scene for the weekend and before I knew it, Sunday morning arrived and I pointed the van in the direction of Oxford and flew up the motorway.
On arrival I was greeted by a packed car park as well as a busy lake. Pete arrived shortly after me and after a bit of cursing we headed off to another water on the complex to see if we would have more luck there.
You see, we have one of these trips every year......just a couple of nights away from our target waters to have a social and a catch up, the end result is always the same though, the lakes are always completely stitched up and we can never get on the fish so just end up camping and moaning about the bloke next door who thinks he has the right to put a bait anywhere he likes, oh the joys of day ticket waters! You would have thought we would have learnt by now!
We did however eventually find a quieter lake and we were soon set up in the same swims we fished last year, with fish showing in front of us it looked promising.
The day passed quietly and before we knew it it was time to climb into the bag and call it a night not to mention recover from the previous few days escapades!
I was awake at 5 am as normal, I fired up the Coleman for the first brew of the day and rolled a smoke. It was a very cold morning and I was the only person awake on the whole lake, the peace was fantastic......but it didn't last long! By 6am the vans started arriving in the car park and hoards of anglers started doing circuits of the lake. At about this point I noticed the fish activity in front of me had moved to the swim to the left of Pete so I quickly moved into there before someone else beat me to it.
As the day wore on the lake filled up and by mid day every swim was taken, spods flying literally all over the place, mallets thumping the ground not to mention people casting where they like! However the fish didn't seem to mind and put in a fantastic acrobatic display for most of the day so I rattled off a few snaps with the SLR, it really did look good for a take and we just couldn't understand why it hadn't done a fish whilst we were there.....to anyone!
By mid afternoon I took a turn for the worst and started feeling a bit crappy and definitely felt that I had the flu coming. We took this as an excuse to have an Indian to try and shift it, as nice as it was it didn't manage to do a thing and by late evening I literally crawled into the bag all the while wishing someone would put me out of my misery. I got no sleep what so ever that night, I was struggling to breath, banging headache and muscles I didn't even know I had were aching!
By 5am I gave up trying to sleep and fired up the Coleman once again before rummaging through my ruck sack to see if I had any pain killers, all I found was an empty packet.....typical!
As soon as it was light I started packing up just wanting to get home, I was glad I did as well as by 8am the spod & marker brigade started their bombing.....my nerves couldn't take anymore so headed for home.
I can never understand why people get their spods and markers out between dawn and 10pm then redo all of their rods, in my opinion this is prime bite time and surely it's best to keep the disturbance down to a minimum and if you need to thrash the water to foam do it after mid-day??!
So here I am sat at the laptop at home typing this up, "Lemsip" in hand praying to wake up feeling fine in the morning, with only a few days holiday left before I head back to work I've already loaded the van and will be heading down to the syndicate in the morning, quite a few of the "Big Girls" are due out so I figured instead of laying in bed feeling sorry for myself, I could do it under the Oval with a chance of a chunk too, I've already been to the chemist to stock up on drugs, no pain no gain eh?!
Hopefully I shall return in a few days feeling like a new man and with some good news,
Until then be lucky,
Smithy