Day Out With Trevor (Crabtree Lake)

My old mate Trevor and I hooked up for an afternoon session after work on Crabtree Lake in Thorpe today in search of big Roach, we both caught and while I managed a new personal best neither of us were able to tempt any of the real monsters.

Trev fished the pole using maggot and corn, on the bottom to start with but when he switched to 'on the drop' the bites became a lot more frequent with corn tempting the slightly bigger fish.

I gave my new Avon rod a work out using a small feeder packed with hemp and corn plugged at both ends with liquidised bread, a single grain of corn on the hook and a quivertip for bite indication, I was getting good solid bites from the off but they were so fast I couldn't hit them! Assuming these were small Roach snatching at the hook bait I ignored the lightning fast bites and only hit the slower pulls and slight drop backs, which worked and I ended up with five or six half decent fish, the two largest of which weighed a healthy 7 ounces, a whole one ounce over my previous PB.

Roach - 7oz

Crabtree is absolutely teeming with Roach, most likely a result of there being no predatory fish present, and are rumoured to go bigger than 2lbs. 

It isn't a big water so locating them shouldn't (famous last words) be too much of a challenge, it's a lovely looking water as well and I'm really looking forward to paying it another visit.