9 October 2017 (Monday) - A Day's Fishing

Much as I enjoyed our weekend away, you can’t beat sleeping in your own bed. After a rather good kip I woke and had a shave. What with shaving foam exploding on Friday and razors breaking yesterday it was good to finally have a shave this morning.
Bearing in mind the fry-ups of the last two days I had a rather subdued brekkie of toast this morning whilst watching “Dads Army” who were playing cricket, then I struggled to find my old fishing shooting jacket. In the end I made do without it.

I drove round to collect "My Boy TM" and Lacey and we went to McDonalds where Lacey had a McSulk because there were no McPancakes. She had no choice but to rough it with a sausage and egg McMuffin (as did we all). Lacey had to go to school, so we dropped her off on our way. What should have been a five-minute drive took nearer twenty minutes due to the road works; Ashford is a nightmare for road works at the moment.
And with Lacey dropped off we drove out to Chequertree fishery for a day’s hunting the haddock. We arrived to find there were already loads of people fishing. We found a space on the lake, set up, cast our lines, and waited. And waited. After half an hour I caught a roach. Not a very big roach, but a roach. After another half an hour I had a carp of about six pounds. Rather good as carp go (for me), but that was the biggest fish of the day for either of us, or of anything we saw landed by anyone else (and that wasn’t much). I probably had about a dozen fish through the day; a few carp, mostly tiddlers. "My Boy TM" had much the same; perhaps a few more tiddlers.
At four o’clock the rain started. We decided that was God’s way of telling us to go home.

Don’t get me wrong – we had a good day out. In all honesty if you are going to go fishing you have to go fully prepared to spend all day at the water’s edge and catch nothing. Anything you catch is a bonus. But it speaks volumes about the place that I went home with a right elbow that wasn’t hurting. I’ve caught so many on trips to Hartley Lands fishery and to Shirkoak that my right elbow has ached for days afterwards.
I’ve decided that I don’t much like Chequertree fishery. Fishing-wise it seems to be far inferior to everywhere else we’ve fished. And the place is busy too. It has caravans and camping and mobile homes and chalets and there are always people bustling about. Fishing is supposed to be peaceful.

I came home, put my fishing gear into the shed  and opened it all so’s it would air out, then walked the dogs round the block. We didn’t go far because of the drizzle, but small dogs would rather walk in the rain than not walk at all.

"er indoors TM" boiled up a rather good bit of dinner, and with her off bowling I set about ironing loads of shirts whilst catching up with stuff the SkyPlus box had recorded for me.

I’m a bit tired: I really should have an early night…

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