The entire month of January was absolutely crazy, with hundreds and hundreds of holidaymakers with a passion for water sports really chopping the place up and making the water very dirty.

The water level as at around 44% and dropping. Most people including myself thought it would be slow going fishing wise, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth, with loads of cod on the chew.

There have been plenty of anglers getting PBs this season and the sheer numbers of cod around the 50-65cm range is crazy, just imagine this waterway in 6-8 years! It’s good now, but there will be so many fish over a meter – it will be insane!

Don’t be scared to troll a little deeper than you normally would at this time of year, as the fish seem to be holding down deeper. The best bit of advice I can give you all is try not to get yourself stuck into simply going to the same old spots you have been going for the last few years. The lake hasn’t been this low for quite sometime and the fish will move to new areas.

A lot of people I have spoken to who have had some of the best sessions this year have said changing up where you fish has been the key to their success, instead of going straight to old haunts because of time constraints, which I am very guilty of myself.

One other thing I would recommend is to get yourself either a 8/0-10/0 weedless bottom weighted style jighead and fit it with a 140-200mm soft plastic. Big is the key, but it’s also important to fish with a stinger hook, either a large treble where you insert one of the hook points join front of the tail leaving two points exposed, or an inline single hook. The most important part is making sure there is a tiny bit of slack in your stinger line, so it allows the tail to swim true and by keeping the large hook at the front buried ever so slightly in the plastic, this weedless technique can be very productive in the timber.

I would also suggest using a slightly weaker rated line to the stinger so that if and when you do get snagged, you only lose the stinger hook and not the whole rig. These type of rigs have caught me loads of fish but almost every single one has been hooked on the stinger and not on the jighead itself.