A pike squares the circle

      I've finally managed to land a pike on a circle hook. No big deal some would say but I feel that it is one small step towards removing all of the barbless treble hooks from my tackle box. She was a lovely plump fish too, what a pleasure to see, a shapely lady in green.
      I don't know what she weighed, in fact I seldom weigh fish now, I unhook them, take a quick photograph and get them back into the water as quickly as possible. The cork handle on the rod s twenty five inches and the net is forty two inches wide so she was a good size and weight and it was more than five minutes before I even caught a glimpse of her.
      After using treble hooks, albeit barbless trebles, the speed of unhooking was quite remarkable, forceps onto the hook it was out. Simple as that, and hooking up into the net. I'm going to stick with them now and see how the season goes.

      Today I only had one run on a fresh roach and that was it, there were next to no predators moving, probably because the pumps had been on again taking the regulation couple of feet of water out of the system but for all that it was an enjoyable couple of hours and at three o'clock the promised rain came that got steadily heavier and heavier as dusk approached.
      Just out of interest here's the stern end of the boat that was featured on my last post about pike fishing, I think that it is slightly beyond being a restoration project.