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These days I seem to always start my reports with the words, 'it was a warm sunny day', but the fact is that as I set out for the Dane river for my latest session, the sky was blue, the sun was shinning and the air was warm.

I had chosen to return to the 'Sunken Tree' where a few weeks ago I had twice bagged up on nice Silver Bream and so was hopeful of a few more. I elected to fish 2LB line straight through to an 18 hook baiting, as nearly always, with maggots dyed bronze with aniseed. My chosen ground bait was a Bream mix together with vanilla flavor corn, casters and crushed baked hemp.

It was easy to see from the first hour that this was not going to be my day where the sport was concerned as almost every fish that came to hand was a Bleak and some of those were very small.

The wildlife however was outstanding, again the Mink wandered the far bank (sorry the photo isn't very good, it was a long way away and the light wasn't good).

Then from no where a Crayfish scuttled into the margin and sat still long enough to let me pick it up.

The next visitor to the swim was a water scorpion (Ranatra), I decided not to pick this up though :D

As the session developed the bites became less frequent he water which had been barely moving seemed almost to stop altogether and for a while it was a little like fishing a still water.

Then rather curiously the water started to bolt through and almost straight away I was into a very nice Silver Bream followed on almost every cast by some good size Roach. I wasn't fishing particularly well, I was missing far more bites than is usual for me and my problems were about to increase.

In the next couple of hours the water dropped around 2 inches and then slowed and with it the bites disappeared all together. I caught just 3 fish in the last hour and after snapping on a submerged snag, I decided to call it a day.

I finished up with 99 fish in a little over 4 hours but most of those came in the first 3 hours and at least half were either Bleak or small Roach. There were a few nice fish mixed in, the weather was fantastic and the surroundings, as always, stunningly beautiful so on the whole I am not complaining but it would have been nice to have had a few more of those nice Bream :)