Last weekend I finally got back on the banks of a gravel pit in search of roach. It was my first roach trip of the season after weeks and weeks of ice cover making fishing impossible.

With a frost-free weekend forecast I took Friday afternoon off and arrived to find the lake empty. This was good and bad – good because I had the pick of swims, bad because it suggested the fishing was going to be hard.

I settled in a successful swim from previous seasons and got the rods out straight away. I’d decided to try casting around a bit and opted for bolt rigs using 50g Preston Quickload Feeders filled with white maggots. A size 18 hook to short hooklength of 0.13mm Powerline (4lb 12oz) fished on a mini helicopter rig completed the set up. The water was very cold having only thawed on the Wednesday and I wasn’t expecting a lot of action. I decided to recast every hour and a half in the hope of landing a hook-bait near a feeding fish. On my second cast I had a drop back and struck into a fish, which from the fight was obviously a roach. As ever with big roach I played it as gently as possible only for the feeder to get caught in the marginal weed. I could feel the roach shaking its head and as I gradually increased the pressure the feeder came free and I was able to net my first roach of the season. I thought it might just make 3lb and was delighted when the scales recorded 3lb 2oz – a personal best by an ounce.

I fished into dark – a time that is normally quiet on the lake and was very surprised to follow it up with a 2lb 10oz roach. The following morning I was up early in the hope of spotting roach rolling but they didn’t show. At 8am I was in again, the only problem being that it was a tufted duck not a roach! How do they find a feeder-full of maggots in 14 feet of water so quickly? The tufty flew away as I resisted a change in the breakfast menu. Another roach mid-morning was my last fish of the trip despite fishing on until Sunday evening. Roach fishing in cold weather, especially with a biting north-east wind is hard work but the rewards make it more than worth it!  The long-range forecast is for more cold weather so if you’ve got a water nearby with roach in it give it a go as they’re the one stillwater species that feeds well in these conditions.