When Dean Macey rocked up to Walthamstow Reservoirs for the first time on the famous North London day-ticket complex's reservoirs Two and Three in several years, the forecast looked off, the dawn window had already gone and a couple of slow laps yielded nothing. By the time the former British decathlete and full-time angler packed up, a "mad hour" had handed him four bream including a male of 12 lb 10 oz — the centrepiece of a short session filmed for the KorumFishing channel.
Macey says he has fished the famous London reservoir complex on and off since the turn of the century — roughly 25 years. The water has a pedigree to match.
"Almost every single one of them's done a carp over 40 lb, some of them over 50 lb. And alongside that, it's also done some giant bream, some massive tench," Macey said, running through the venue's specimen credentials at the start of the video.
His morning didn't start well. The 7am gate opening landed him on the water roughly an hour after first light — typically the best spotting window on these venues — and a walk around reservoirs Two and Three turned up no signs.
"I did a few laps around the two and the three," Macey said. "I didn't see a single thing and we've been here a couple of hours now, if I'm honest, with the rods out and I still haven't seen anything."
He set up between an island and open water, choosing to commit to a feed pattern in a swim he liked the look of. The wind was the wrong wind on paper.
"When I looked at my weather app this morning, it said northeasterly wind. That's not normally the wind that you would want to get on the end of," Macey said. "Albeit I will say this and the gremlins have already started. It's a lot warmer than a northeasterly is normally. So, maybe they are on the end of it."
"12 lb is quite heavy for bream fishing, but remember it's the wear and tear of actually fishing, hitting the clip all the time," Macey said. "When you're on venues like this where there is a potential for you hooking carp, you've got to be geared up to land the biggest fish you're likely to hook."
His rig was a lead clip with a 3 oz lead, around 8 to 9 inches of 10 lb fluorocarbon, a size six all-rounder hook, a critically balanced 10 mm wafter tipped with a worm, and a small PVA bag of pellets and crumb. He kept the colour dark, in part to keep the local birdlife from smashing his spot, and in part because of the kind of pressured fish Walthamstow holds.
"I think they're quite cute and I think if they're going to settle on a bit of bait, they're probably likely to settle on a bit of bait that sort of blends in that's got a nice little pungent smell to it that's also got that natural element of the worm settling as well," Macey said.
For hours, nothing. Then the bobbins started dropping back.
"This is actually one of three in a mad hours fishing this morning," Macey said as he held up the first double-figure fish — a 10 lb 7 oz bream. A 9 lb 13 oz specimen quickly followed.
The third was the standout.
"A woolly old male of 12 lb 10. A bit bigger than I thought he was going to be actually, but he's really solid and heavy and wide," Macey said. "There's something about these dark woolly barnacle type looking male fish. I just absolutely love them. They look prehistoric and this one is as prehistoric as they come."
A fourth bream in the 9 lb class arrived shortly after to round off the burst. Even Macey, no stranger to big-fish red-letter days, was caught off guard by the result.
"If you'd have told me at the start of the session I'd have caught four bream, two of them being double figures, one of them being a lovely 12 pounder, I'd have bit your arm off for that with the conditions that we're faced with," he said.