17lb 1oz bream ends three month campaign
This huge 17lb 1oz bream is perfect proof that perseverance is the key when targeting specimen fish after Mark Simmonds smashed his personal best from a venue that hadn’t produced a bite for three months.
He’d been focusing his attentions on a lake in Cambridgeshire and until his latest session he hadn’t even seen a sign of his intended quarry.
But that all changed when the St Neots, Cambs-based specialist decided to follow the wind and introduce a large bed of mixed particles, pellets and boilies over a spot between two gravel bars.
He fished three rods, that were all finished with different hookbaits, in conjunction with PVA bags. And it was two home-made 11mm fishmeal boilies tipped with a 10mm Top Baits Condensed Milk pop-up that produced his first bite.
“Up until this weekend I had nothing to show for almost three months - I hadn’t had so much as a bleep or seen a single fish show itself,” Mark told Angling Times.
“I had my own 40th birthday party to attend in the evening and I wasn’t expecting much action but I had a huge drop-back bite at 6.30am on the final morning of the trip.
“The fight was unspectacular and my friend was soon slipping the net under a proper dustbin lid of a fish it was almost as tall as it was long and around five inches across the back. When my friend read the weight off the scales I nearly fell over with shock and I had to check them myself just to be sure!
After losing another fish an hour later he rounded off the session with a second double figure bream weighing 11lb 12oz and his biggest fish smashes his previous personal best that stood at 14lb 2oz.
“I continued to get liners, but I had to sort my party out which was a bit gutting in a way as all that time trying to locate them was finally paying off,” added Mark, who used 25lb braided mainlines and coated braid hooklinks with size 10 hooks.
