Day 7 : River Ijssel - Copse

Tue 7th April

A very still morning

Change of plan

As stated on yesterday's blog, we had intended to fish Mad German today. We got up extra early as we need to load everything into the cars so we could head straight for the ferry afterwards. However, on arrival we found most of the Mad German pegs taken by people that had obviously night fished. Many (if not all) were German as they had bells on the end of their rods. We drove down as far as the cars will go and were met by a discgraceful scene; there were discarded black bin bags full of burned cooking equipment (grills etc) and what looked like a complete tent discarded in a heap in the field. There were also several metal tent spikes half in the gound over a wide area - glad I didn't drive over those!

I had not fished Copse before so we decided to try that as it is close to Mad German and also allows the cars behind your peg - essential today as we would need to re-pack once we had finished fishing. As previously, I sent the above photo to Bertie and he joined us for a few hours. This allowed me to buy more feeders (a bit lighter this time) as the flow was more sedate here.

One last time

I started with a couple of Roach and then hit a snag and lost everything. On Bertie's advice I then went a few metres further out to avoid the snag. This seemed to work. The bites were not as frequent as they were at the Railway Bridge. Bertie was also catching quite regularly.

Garry had a similar start but hit something much bigger. I though he had hooked the bottom as he had a healthy bend in his rod. Betrie took the following photo - thank you.

That's a Bream smile

It took Garry quite a while to bring the Bream within netting range due it's size and the flow. Unfortunately it slipped the hook before we actaully saw this fish. Garry's initial reaction (after the expletives) was that he thought it was his biggest Bream ever. He revised this later as it could have been the flow that made it feel so big. We will never know. He did then get another Bream but it was much much smaller - probably less than 2lbs.

I continued to catch the odd Roach before I too got a Bream. Mine was maybe 3 lbs. Garry also caught an Ide he estimated at 2 lbs.

Bertie started well but the fish had dried up for him too. 

Time to go

The end result was 7lbs 12oz for Garry (inc 2lb for the Ide) and 8lbs 10oz for me.

We sat in the sun to eat our pack-up before the dreaded re-loading of the cars. Our journey to Rotterdam was not great as we seemed to be hitting traffic from before Utrecht right through to Rotterdam. Consequently we arrived just one hour before boarding closed. This was too close for comfort as we usually like to be there early and the sat-nav did give an even later ETA on a few occasions.  The knock-on effect was that we were well back when exiting the ferry so had a long wait to get through passport control in Hull. We generally get through there quite quickly. We have already made a note to leave earlier next time.