Andy Crouchers Story
Opening day at Stocks Reservoir – 25 Feb 2006-03-02
It all started with an epic drive from Reading, a crap night’s kip in a travel lodge, and then a treasure hunt for the Reservoir. However, despite all of that I found myself at Stock at 0800hrs on the morning of Opening Day. I was not the only lunatic to embark on this journey as there were a dozen or so of the Soldier Palmers equally as keen (mad) as me.
I looked out over the reservoir and thought “how lovely”……… yeah, bollocks! It reminded me of the first day of a particularly miserable exercise. I gathered together the vortex of tackle from the back of the van (yes, I know I should have at least thrown away the remains of my lunch from the Fur and Feather) and made my way, with my boat partner for the day Tony Hoggart, to the boats. After a couple of water stops and a note to myself to “get a grip” we covered the ground well and made it to the boat jetty in just under the hour. The boats were fine, not quite Anglian Water standard, but plenty good enough …….. the engine seemed a little under powered though.
Being a master at tying leaders up while afloat I had finished my leader within two minutes of the drogue going in, this left a further two minutes for me to unwrap it from the engine before we hit the dam wall (You could say that it was a bit of a fast drift). Perfect! 20ft of oil coated Grad Max, “Oh well” I thought, the stockies won’t be that fussy.
I started the engine, turned the boat into the wind and wound the throttle full on, it then became clear to us that we had a duff engine (it just wouldn’t go forward) and decided to take it back and change it for a real one. With both of us ducking down in the boat out of the wind it was just possible to get some forward speed. It took just under an hour to cover about 400m back to the jetty. On our journey back to the jetty we passed the Captain and Vice Captain who were busy showing the rest of us what it really meant to be a team. It was beautiful to see; they were both sharing the same rod, and while one was fishing the other was spinning the boat round and round so that they didn’t move off the great spot that they had found. Poetry in motion!
Back at the jetty I assessed the situation while waiting for our new engine, apparently the other one had been restricted so that it didn’t run out of fuel (bloody stupid idea). It was 1100 hrs, I was cold, wet and knackered, and I hadn’t even managed to cast my well greased leader in anger. We decided to have a hot brew and make our way up to the northern shallows.
It was like a different reservoir at the north end and I was quickly into fish on a DI5/3, cat booby on the point, and a couple of mini lures (damsel & black widow) on the droppers. The fish were tight to the shore, and the islands, which gave me plenty of practice setting up short drifts, in fact the engine must have been on every 5 minutes. We could have anchored up near the shore and hammered the fish but instead we decided to drift fish all day as it was obvious that we needed the practice.
It 1300 hrs and hoggsy still hadn’t touched a fish, his bottom lip was starting to tremble and sensing that he was a bit vulnerable I thought it best to offer him a few encouraging words; “give me your rod and I’ll catch one for you” I said, and “look, everyone’s catching”. I think it cheered him up and it definitely made me laugh.
It was shortly after my motivational words that we drifted quite close to a bank angler, I noticed that he wasn’t fishing and asked him if he minded us drifting through, “no” he replied, “it’s gone a bit quiet”. Just as the last word let the bank angler’s mouth, who by now was only 15 metres away, Hoggsy’s rod arched over into his first fish of the loch-style year. All 9 ½ lbs. of it! Needless to say the “encouragement” I was giving him stopped.
Overall it was a good day out and an even better shake out. We had a dozen fish each, and after hoggsy’s monster I managed to pick one up of 8 ½ lbs. as well.