Unlike fish, terrapins have legs!

First fish of the day fell to maggot on the tele-pole

I am slowly working my way around the lakes at Beaver Fishery. Today, I spent the day in one of my favourite spots on The Major's Lake; the grassy bank that separates it from Maze lake.  I had planned to try out my modified feeders but instead I thought it was about time I got the longer pole out. If I had taken the feeder rods, I think it would have been a repeat of last week. One of the things I like about Beaver is the diversity of water. Even within the same lake, there are totally different spots to fish. If I am honest, this place, although picturesque, is probably not the hottest peg on the lake.

 A bank vole doing the cleaning up!

For me, it is not entirely about catching fish all day. If I want to do that I can by fishing Jeff's Lake as I did last week. Today I just fancied a quiet day and if I caught a few fish that would be a bonus. I had a visit from a very tame bank vole who kept coming back all day. He was happy to eat most things that landed in his path. First, he cleaned up all the sweetcorn only to go on to some Two Dog boilies - everybody likes Two Dog bait!  Later I had another visitor who was not so happy to be there.

The lake here is very shallow; only a couple of foot deep. This time of year the water is warm and absolutely full of fry. I had made up a mush from some stale bread and a liberal dose of ground up Vitalin. This I was using as a groundbait to feed the swim when I first got there and to top up during the day. The fry went bonkers for it - there must have been thousands (maybe millions) swimming about. The water was thick with them. Fishing through them was interesting, but I still managed to catch a good few fish. Nothing exceptional but a good variety of roach, rudd, perch and even a decent sized tench. That was an experience on the tele-pole, but I managed to land it. That one fish covered everything in slime - bream have nothing on tench in the slime stakes.

It gets more interesting when something like this tench goes for a single grain of corn hanging on the end of a cheap tele-pole

All the action was coming from close in, within five to six meters. I was fishing using one of the tele-poles and another I had modified to be a cupping kit. At this point, I decided to get the longer pole out, again my inexpensive Maver 9.5m pole. Cheap and cheerful is the only way to describe this thing. It is cumbersome at full length and the only way to fish with it for any time is to use a support roller atop a bank stick. Not the most solid of setups, but it works for me. I fished it at the full 9.5m and caught absolutely nothing. It was not the pole's fault there were just no fish in the middle of the lake.

The longer pole reached out into the middle of this part of the lake but found no fish

I stripped the pole down to top-kit and one section and continued to fish. This produced instant success on corn and maggots. Lots of small (as opposed to tiny) perch, roach and rudd. Surprisingly no skimmers or bream and I did not catch a carp all day, not even on the sleeper rod that was fishing the far margin all day.

Nice perch. one of many caught around this size. One day I will catch a bigger one but this will do for today

It was all going nicely. I had packed up most of the gear and was just fishing the last hour with the top-kit + one when the tip bent around, and the elastic took a dive into the water. What! I was confused. Whatever this was it was heavy, but it was moving slowly. No thrashing about and it felt like a dead weight. I slowly encouraged it to the surface only to discover it was a terrapin, a huge thing the size of a dinner plate! I thought I had seen a couple of terrapins basking on a rock a couple of years ago, but could not be sure as they disappeared before I could get a good look. Today there was no doubt there it was sitting in my landing net. Pondering how I was going to unhook it as its mouth was firmly closed, I put it down on my unhooking mat and like a flash it got up and ran straight back into the lake, cutting the line as it went. The trouble was, I did not think about the fact that unlike fish, terrapins have legs, and this one used them to leg-it before I had a chance to take a photograph.

After that excitement, I decided to pack up and make my way home. Another successful day at Beaver. For me, it is not about how many or how big the fish is, it is about having a nice relaxing day and exercising the muscles I don't usually use.

Dropshotting in The Medway on Sunday with the other bloke. We might even try a spot of tele-pole fishing as well. Neither of us has ever fished this river before, so it could be interesting.

Ralph.