Jester explains:

“With everything packed into the car, I head off to meet a friend at his syndicate for a guest session, I was buzzing and couldn’t wait to get there. We turned up before first light on the Saturday to find a packed lake. After standing in the darkness for an hour,” we heard a good few fish showing on the back of what looked like a fairly substantial weed bed in the gloomy light. With this in mind we decided to walk round to the nearest free swim on the other side to see first light in.

“It quickly became apparent that there were a lot of fish moving from the quiet corner we were in and the big weed bed we had heard them ‘sloshing over’ in. Luckily for me, my mate Lee let me have pick of the swims, which was a bit of a no brainer after seeing all the activity (cheers mate)! After watching what the fish were doing, I decided to set a trap down the left-hand tree line with one rod and fish the other two up to the back of a big weedbed on what seemed to be their natural patrol route from one area of the lake to the other. After a bit of leading about, I found a small gravel strip amongst the lighter weed that backed onto the large weedbed, which was just big enough to fit two rods on. Perfect!

“Rig wise, I kept things simple with Claw rigs utilising the new TA Beaked Chod hooks on short lengths of 35lb Camstiff. These were balanced out with Pineapple & N’Butyric pop-ups with bunches of maggots. Once the rigs were balanced, they were flicked out to the spot until they got the crack downs I was looking for.

“After getting the rods out, I set about baiting the little gravel spot quite heavily with 5kg of crumbed Krill Active, Bloodworm Pellets, half a gallon of maggots and about a litre of Liquid Liver & Pure Calanus liquid. The rest of the evening was spent chilling over a BBQ and a few cans as the evening sun dropped over the trees, taking in the beautiful surroundings.

“From about 11pm until 4am the liners were relentless, and I was fully expecting one of them to bust off, so when I awoke at first light and all the rods were still on the rests, I was quite surprised. In the thick autumnal mist, the odd fish could still be heard thundering out behind me in amongst the jungle of weed, so there was still hope it may happen.

“Out of the blue, at about 9.15am, I had a good liner on the right-hand rod that just held there, with me and my mate staring at it, willing it to churn off, before the bobbin slowly dropped back to its original position. While Lee was sitting in my swim, I got him to sit on my rods so I could quickly check in the back of the snags I was fishing nearby. As I got halfway down to the snags my receiver let out a shrill of beeps, paused briefly, then started churning…. No encouragement was needed, and I legged it back to the rods, with my mate quickly passing me the right-hand rod that I hadn’t long just had a liner on! Fortunately for me it instantly started wallowing on the surface doing nothing dramatic at all, with me slowly teasing it in, amongst the morning mist with the full morning chorus of bird life breaking the silence. It wasn’t until I finally got it in the margins that it decided to run me around on a right ol’ merry dance for five minutes or so until it eventually got its head into a weedbed. As soon as she had a good amount of weed over her head, it was a case of calmly drawing the ball of weed and fish over the drawcord.

“As we slowly pulled the weed off her grey shoulders, it revealed an absolutely mega looking row of big, broken scales and wrinkly old skin with the other side, in complete contrast, being quite plain. ‘That’s the Fish of Two Halves’ my mate exclaimed! Happy days indeed, and a great way to finish a lovely little 24hr guest trip!”