Michael Woods from Norfolk and his brother Kieran had a memorable night’s feeder fishing on the River Yare, catching an estimated 200lb of bream to 9lb. Here’s his account of a red letter day:

Following Storm Doris I heard the local rivers were high with surge non-salt tides pushing through colour on both the Yare and Waveney. Because of this I had a feeling one of my all time favourite river stretches on the Yare could be on good form.

I have a love and hate relationship with Thorpe Green as it’s a beautiful stretch of slow moving river in lovely surroundings but at the same time can be incredibly difficult with blanks commonplace and busy, being close to a road and popular with dog walkers and duck feeders! It’s pretty much all about the bream fishing, but only when colour pushes through. When it’s clear (as it usually is) you can get roach but they are not very plentiful or big fish.

I could see the river was not too dark but a perfect cloudy brown and a nice flow. I knew it was worth going for it during the evening.  The plan was to fish from 7pm onwards and attack the peg with one feeder line, putting in plenty of bait. Out went 10 XL cages full of groundbait, containing lots of casters, corn and chopped worm. I then fished two full worms and a dead red maggot on the hook.

An ounce feeder was holding bottom perfectly and the first 45 minutes was good with four decent bream in the net and Kieran had two. They were all proper bream over 5lb each, so I upped the feed to hold the shoal. From the second hour onwards the fishing was superb. The Bream kept coming and many were 6lb to 9lb+ fish! I lost count but must have had approximately 40 slabs and Kieran had at least 15.

With rain forecast in the early hours we decided to stop fishing by midnight. It was a shame as, although the tide was now ebbing, the fish were still feeding well and getting bigger! The fish all went back safely and we didn’t want to mess about weighing them, but estimated 200lb with the average size of fish. It will have to go down as one of those rare red letter days that keeps you coming back for more. It’s a pity we only have two weekends left of the river season now!