I made my first trip of the season to Hanningfield today, and the first since it had been opened to "any method" anglers.

I was fortunate to have Gary Morris, Hanningfield FA's season ticket winning matchman of the year and England International as my boat partner, and was looking forward to a good day afloat. Gary is a real "Cockney Geezer" and great company.

Reports had been good and there were quite a number of anglers queueing for boats tickets at 8am, the info being that the Inlet was the place to go. That's where we headed but an hour's drifting into the dam and we had not seen a fish caught, in spite of their being ten boats and half a dozen bank anglers in the vicinity.

Interestingly, I did not see a single bait angler although there were a couple of guys casting spinners off the dam into the wind and a couple of boats pike fishing with spinners.

After moving to the Peninsula a couple of hours later we started to pick up fish on Di7's and boobies, Gary on black, myself on white and we had quite a few follows and taps. The water is exceptionally clear for the time of year, and it was possible to see fish swirling behind the fly quite deep from time to time. A boat to boat conflab with another pair of regulars identified that they were getting fish shallow, so we switched to internediates and started to get even more interest.

We ended up with around a dozen apiece, not big fish and clearly stockies, but they have 1,000 8-10lbs fish in the cages which will be released gradually from April.

A really nice day and a lot of fun.

Charlie

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Sonik Sports Team Pitsford Pirates