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22 September 2016 (Thursday) - Fishing

I slept like a log last night and was busy in the midst of a nightmare about our mortgage provider becoming a political party (what was that about?) when the alarm woke me. I scoffed some toast whilst watching “South Park” then had a quick look-see on-line.
Other than more scamming emails from allegedly deposed African royalty needing my help to regain their fortunes, and more emails from Amazon trying to sell me what I’d already bought from them, not a lot had changed.

I drove round to collect "My Boy TM" and we went on to The Foundry for a spot of brekkie. You can’t beat a fry-up. And suitably replete we made our way to the Royal Military Canal at Appledore. We’d been thinking of going fishing for a while, and the canal would be somewhere different. We’d not fished there since "My Boy TM" was about eight years old.
We weren’t entirely sure who owned the fishing rights so we parked by a sign that said “Day Tickets Available” and thought we’d get a day ticket *if* the bailiff came round. If he didn’t we wouldn’t.

We were soon fishing; I had a dace within seconds of setting up. We had a rather good time. The sun was out, we heard frogs, we watched a kingfisher fly by. We even saw a small grass snake. We even caught fish. To be honest the fishing wasn’t that good. In fairness it was sporadic. We’d catch several then go half an hour without a bite.
Just as the wind was picking up to make fishing a chore Dan coughed and I looked up. We had a visitor. A chap with an “Environment Agency” T-shirt. We both looked at each other – it was as well we’d both bought rod-and-line licences. But the nice man from the Environment Agency wasn’t interested in seeing our licences. He just sat and chatted with us for half an hour and told us of a stretch of the canal where you don’t need day tickets. Bearing in mind how the wind was against us we packed up and relocated five miles up the canal to Warehorne.

We soon found the canal, and after two minutes we found a far better spot to fish. The fishing itself wasn’t any better than it had been near Appledore, but it wasn’t any worse. But there was no wind and there was no bulrushes in our way.
After an hour or so "My Boy TM" asked me to get the landing net. He had a rather large rudd. He declared it was his “P.B. rudd.” I smiled sweetly; thinking it rather nice that he’d named the fish “Paddington Bear”. After a few minutes I found out that a “P.B.” is a “personal best”.
One lives and learns.

Eventually it was time to come home. The fish had stopped biting; the sun was going down. It was noticeably colder. So I took "My Boy TM" home and came home to a very excitable little dog. I immediately took him for his walk. We went through the wetlands park. I would have carried on into Viccie Park butu I’d forgotten the funfair was in town. "Furry Face TM" barked at it to tell it off.

I took some photos whilst we were out fishing earlier. While "er indoors TM" boiled up a rather good bit of dinner I posted them on-line. We then had gammon steaks. Not too shabby…

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