Ideas and action

 I do sometimes feel that I'm guilty of overthinking a problem when the blatantly obvious is staring me straight in the face. This current Pike season has seen me struggle, like never before, as I plied my craft on the banks of The (Kentish) Stour. Not one bite registered along my chosen section and just four Pike landed between November and the start of January. Insane; had I forgotten how to catch them? The February RMC return had always been part of my plans, so to get off to such a (late January) flyer with a "twenty" was certainly a confidence booster. However, as reported in an earlier post, the loss of two "decent" fish hasn't been quite what I'd hoped for and there has certainly been a great deal of head scratching - I've got the splinters to prove it! I've been forced to revisit many of my basic concepts of bait presentation and rig mechanics just to ensure that they still functioned 100% in my current situation. 

Not too sure that many other Pike anglers will be
using ABU Cardinal 55's?

Analytical thinking! Here I am, back in my Unilever days, under the tutorage of Sarah Frost, looking at details with a statistical process control mentality. Many will doubt the part that this industrial process could possibly play in an angling situation? Maybe they're correct but, for me, the skill set involved has allowed me to tweak my presentations to a point, at which, I'm very confident. Just to illustrate this exact point I was back down on the RMC this morning, tweaks in place! Two bites resulted in two Pike to the landing net, which has to be an improvement in itself. The first weighed in at 21 lbs 3 oz and the second 15 lbs 8 oz. Happy? Off the scale!

21 lbs 3oz of pure joy

I'm completely out of my depth when attempting to offer any logical explanation
as how this Pike has sustained such horrific injuries? Not replicated on the 
other flank, thus unlikely to be due to natural causes.

I make no claim to have solved all the issues which have beset me over these past few months but, feel very confident, I'm headed in a positive direction. I've been going back through my diary records, right back to 1980, looking for clues and there is one fact which has become glaringly obvious. I've never landed a twenty pound Pike in March! Guess what? I'm going to give it a bloody good try in the first fourteen days of March 2023.