Kevin Leighfield a regular at our matches tells us how he got on during a pleasure session last July.

Having had a couple of good sessions earlier in the year I returned to Petworth park on Friday 25th July to see if the shoals of bream had returned to the roadside bank. Armed with a very modest menu of pint of casters, pint of red maggots and a bag of groundbait I settled into the first peg after the concrete.

Having decided how far out I was going to fish I mixed up my groundbait and put out 2 balls into my target area. I set up a tip rod with a small open end feeder and loaded this with groundbait and cast to the area I was going to fish. For the first 20 minutes or so I retrieved, reloaded and recast the feeder at fairly regular intervals this was the point at which I had my first bite and brought back a skimmer bream of around 1 lb, a bit smaller than I was hoping for but a good sign nonetheless.

had obviously managed to draw the fish in as from then on all through the morning the bites came fairly regularly.Bite detection was not the easiest, although I was using a fairly sensitive tip the bites ranged from light twitches to something a little more positive. Added to this because I had quite a few fish in the swim I was getting some light line bites as well. Under these circumstances you sometimes just have to sit on your hands until you are sure of a positive take. At lunch time I sat back for a few minutes to take stock and the morning session had produced 11 bream with the largest weighing in at 6 lb I also had one tench. I had a quick cup of tea and bite to eat before I fished on for the afternoon session.

The next hour was a bit quiet with only 3 bream but things picked up for the last couple of hours of the session. After a total of 5 hours of fishing I decided that was enough for the day and my count up gave me a total of 25 bream and 3 tench with a few bits and pieces. I would like to think I was pretty close to breaking 100 lb but for the record I am confident that I had in excess of 90 lb and I am very happy with that!

I did notice that a couple of the bream had some small sores on them but not to the level of earlier in the season. These are almost certainly spawning sores and are often seen on bream during May and early June – this breeding thing can get quite violent with some fish! It was great to see so many bream in good condition and I am really pleased to have put together a catch of this size over a 5 hour period.

Now I can’t wait to get back up here for the next match which is at the beginning of September. I will of course be drawn nowhere near where I want to be but such is life, hopefully somebody will be on the bream and get a good match weight. Petworth Park is such a valuable fishery for the club especially as the fish can be brought on to respond to a variety of methods, I have fished with success on the feeder, waggler and pole. The only slight downside is the walk back up the hill when you have finished, however after a session like this it’s like flat ground!

Kevin Leighfield