The River Arrow - Detectorism and DiscursiveMeanderingness

I woke with that familiar, half-formed optimism that only an angler can truly appreciate: the belief that today might be the day, despite all evidence to the contrary gathered over decades of personal experience. A bite was required. Not desired, not hoped for required, like tea, oxygen, or a mild complaint about the weather.

The first act of the morning ritual was enacted with the solemnity of a pagan ceremony: checking the local river levels. The Arrow, that most contrary of rivers, looked fishable. Not ideal, mind. Still a little higher than I’d like, a little browner than I’d planned for in my imagination, but close enough to justify lying to myself.

Anyway, it’s only fifteen minutes by car to the stretch I’ve been fishing recently. Fifteen minutes is nothing in angling terms. You can waste fifteen minutes just tying a hooklength you’ll immediately cut off again because it “doesn’t feel right”. So off I went, threading my way along country lanes clearly designed in medieval times to accommodate one horse, a sack of turnips, and the occasional chicken with a death wish. And then, just as I hit the main road into town, there it was: the Line. A vast, unbroken conga of parked cars stretching into the distance like a metallic spawning run.

Now I don’t mind company, but my angling brain instantly did what it always does: Match fishing. I could see them in my mind’s eye already keepnets like submarine pens, stopwatches, men shouting numbers at one another with the intensity of air-traffic controllers. My fishing time, I feared, was about to be curtailed to something resembling a polite paddle.

I parked before the combination-locked gate, checked the club book (as one does, because rules are important and because it allows us to feel morally superior), and… nothing. No match. No warning. No ominous footnote saying “Abandon all hope ye who seek solitude.” Perhaps it was on Facebook. But I don’t use Facebook. I have enough ways of being confused and irritated without adding that particular circus to the repertoire.

Oh well. Get fishing anyway.

I headed straight to the banker swim under the bridge – a spot that has rescued many a blank and restored many a wounded ego. Five minutes in, I missed a couple of bites. Proper bites too. The sort that make your heart do that ridiculous little leap before immediately kicking you in the shins. Third time lucky though, and a fish was on. 

The water was a milky brown, perhaps six inches of visibility at best, but I was fishing visible white bread – a bait so bright it practically files a flight plan. The fish turned out to be a chub of about two pounds. Nothing to write to the record books about, but as every angler knows: a fish is a fish is a fish, and each one counts double if you’ve already begun mentally drafting a blog post about blanking.

As I landed it, an elderly gentleman appeared on the bridge, peering down like a benevolent gargoyle. Conversation followed, as it always does near bridges.

“Morning.”

“Morning.”

“Just to warn you,” he said, in the tone of a man announcing incoming weather or invading armies, “you’re about to be joined by a load of people.”

Ah. So it was a match then.

“Nope,” he said cheerfully. “Dirt fishermen. Metal detectorists. About sixty of us.”

Sixty.

Now I’m not one to judge. Fishing, after all, is basically just staring at water while holding a stick. Metal detecting is staring at fields while listening to beeps. Cousins, really. Still, the mental image of sixty headphone-wearing relic hunters descending upon my previously empty stretch of river was… unexpected.

He assured me they wouldn’t bother me, and to be fair they didn’t. Soon the banks were populated by an extraordinary parade of attire: full tactical commando outfits, as if expecting enemy fire from the reeds; carp-lifer chic (beanies, muted colours, expressions of permanent mild suffering); and then the outliers blazing red jackets visible from space, presumably to aid satellite navigation or alien contact. Mostly elderly men, but also kids and women, all united by the hopeful beep of buried history and the unshakeable belief that this next signal might be the big one.

I was full expecting to see Jeff Hatt from https://digregardless.blogspot.com/ but he didn't' appear. 

I roved on. The river was still high, but the slacks were doing their thing. A shallow back eddy produced a savage bite, followed by the inevitable snag-finding manoeuvre performed by all self-respecting chub. The next cast, however, resulted in redemption. Another fish on. And another later. And another. By the time the session wound down I’d landed six chub, the best nudging three pounds  not monsters, but honest fish, caught in honest conditions, while surrounded by a mobile museum of people earnestly failing to find anything.

Did they find treasure? From the snippets of conversation I overheard: no. Certainly not another Brownhills Hoard, that legendary £3 million stash discovered by Terry Herbert in a field belonging to Fred Johnson the sort of story that keeps detectorists detecting and anglers angling, both convinced that today might be the day everything changes.

As I packed up, the detectorists drifted away, pockets no heavier, spirits undimmed. I reflected that the river, the fish, and the strange pageant of humanity had combined into one of those sessions you couldn’t plan if you tried. Slightly surreal. Mildly ridiculous. Entirely memorable.

And that, really, is fishing.

Warwickshire Stour - Osmiferousbreaminality AND Turbiditationalism

There are times on the Warwickshire Stour when you feel less like an angler and more like an unpaid extra in a low-budget natural history documentary entitled Men Who Persist Despite All Available Evidence. This winter has been one of those times. 

The Warks Stour Power WhatsApp group normally a place of mild exaggeration, heroic selfies, and suspiciously well-timed PBs has recently taken on the tone of a grief counselling session chaired by a damp keepnet. Three men. One river. And a collective inability to get anything resembling consistency out of it.

The trio in question are, of course, myself (the roaming optimist), Nic of Avon Angling fame (who knows this river better than the fish themselves), and George “I Don’t Blog Any More” Burton, who despite the name has begun the New Year obsessed with the idea of a big Stour roach an obsession that places him somewhere between dedicated specimen hunter and man waiting for a bus that may never come.

Now the Stour has been patchy. Not “a bit hit and miss” patchy, but Jekyll and Hyde with a landing net patchy. Hit it right and you’re into chub as if they’ve formed a queue. Miss it by a matter of hours and you could spend the entire session communing with gudgeon that nibble like Victorian pickpockets. Only a short while ago I had seven chub in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it session, each one convincing me I’d cracked the code. The very next day? Naff all most likely. Not even a courtesy knock.

Nic, being a man of science (or at least a man who sounds scientific when holding a glass of water), reckons it’s all down to water colour. And I suspect he’s onto something. He’d fished it when the river was still charging through, but the colour oh the colour was that unmistakable Stour green. Not a pleasant mossy green. Not a healthy aquatic green. More like the colour the Hulk might produce after a heavy night involving lime slush puppies and a Midori Sour chaser. Visibility somewhere between “murky” and “why bother wearing polarised glasses at all.”

When the Stour’s in proper flood, chocolate brown and angry, it can actually fish well. Those canals in spitting distance turbidity, the fish lose their paranoia, and those old, streetwise roach the ones with PhDs in hook avoidance suddenly fancy a wander. They know the drill. Brown water means fewer fins brushing their flanks and fewer beady-eyed anglers staring into their souls. Confidence, it turns out, is a murky thing.

So off I went, roving like a man with optimism but no plan, alternating between half a lobworm and bread, with liquidised bread laced with geranium essential oil squeezed lovingly into the feeder. Yes, geranium. Don’t ask. I read it somewhere once, probably at midnight, probably written by a man who owns more tweed than sense.

The conditions were, frankly, abysmal. A cold wind gusting like it had a personal vendetta against my quivertip. Bites were less “tap tap” and more “was that the wind or my imagination?” Not exactly textbook stuff, but then needs must when the river calls and the canals are still sulking in the background.

And then because fishing is nothing if not a cruel performance artist within ten minutes I had rattly bites on the one-ounce tip in the very swim that produced my PB river roach. I struck. 

The rod hooped. And for approximately three seconds I was connected to destiny. Roach? Chublet? I’ll never know. It felt right. It felt silvery. And then it was gone, leaving only a slack line and that hollow feeling anglers carry far longer than any fish.

After that, swim after swim delivered nothing but nibbles. Tiny fish with ambition vastly exceeding mouth capacity. Strikes that connected with nothing but hope. 

 At one point I deployed the “get out of jail card” those woody swims that usually cough up at least something but even they merely offered more pecking and more disappointment. Even the chub didn't show after switching to an all out bread feeder attack. 

Four hours later I was staring down the barrel of a blank. A proper one. The sort that seeps into your bones and makes you question past life choices. Meanwhile, downstream, George was into bream. And not just bream good’uns. Slabs. 

The sort of fish that arrive uninvited and leave your landing net smelling like a trawler’s sock drawer. It just goes to show what can turn up in this river as it winds through open farmland, quietly ignoring our theories and plans. 

On the plus side, my landing net remained blissfully free of bream slime, my garage was spared, and domestic harmony was preserved. Small victories matter.

Still, I’m fed up with floodwater now. Properly fed up. The romance has worn thin. The Stour will do what it wants, when it wants, and explain nothing. I’m not quite ready to retreat to the canals just yet but the thought is there, hovering, like a backup plan written in pencil.

Until then, we’ll keep going. Because sometimes the blank is part of the story. And sometimes, just sometimes, the river gives you three seconds of magic enough to keep you coming back for the next chapter

Warwickshire Avon - Reverberations and Ruminations

There are moments, usually around three in the morning when the tinnitus starts doing its own ambient remix, that I find myself wondering whether life might have panned out differently had I known, back in the early nineties, that the barbel stocks in Warwickshire resembled something closer to the biblical plague proportions of the mighty Trent. 

Had this knowledge been imparted to me perhaps by a benevolent angling oracle wearing a bucket hat I might have stepped down from those speaker arrays, stopped using my inner ear as a bass port, and invested instead in a decent pair of waders and some tins of spam.

Of course, this would have required foresight, and foresight was in tragically short supply when one was twenty-something, chemically optimistic, and convinced that the meaning of life could be found somewhere between a strobe light and a white label pressing from Detroit.

 Standing on speakers was not just encouraged, it was practically a civic duty. 

If the bass didn’t rearrange your internal organs, you weren’t really listening. The fact that I now hear a constant high-pitched whine is simply my brain nostalgically replaying the encore.

Then came the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, a piece of legislation so poetically absurd that it managed to define music by its repetitiveness. 

A “succession of repetitive beats,” they said, as though that wasn’t also an accurate description of both angling conversation and the average heart rate of a tench. 

The police were handed the power to shut down joy itself, prompting electronic musicians to respond in the only reasonable way: by writing deliberately non-repetitive music purely out of spite. Somewhere in this period, I realised that nothing bonds people quite like being told they’re not allowed to enjoy themselves rhythmically.

Fast-forward three decades and here I am, fifty-three years old, with three gigs booked and a spine that sounds like gravel being stirred with a bank stick. Sasha and my DJ mate Steve Parry in his hometown Liverpool. Deep Dish at the legendary Sub Club in Glasgow. And, looming gloriously on the horizon, 808 State in Brum, those heroic knob-twizzlers who proved that a Roland TB-303 could sound like an alien frog trapped in a biscuit tin. I and the ageing likeminded will attend all of them with the unshakeable belief that age is merely a suggestion.

My wife, bless her, continues to find it baffling that the same man who seeks enlightenment and solitude beside a river at dawn can willingly stand in a dark room being physically assaulted by subwoofers. She sees contradiction. I see balance. One moment you’re feeling the subtle pluck of a barbel three feet under the surface; the next you’re feeling bass frequencies rearranging your kidneys. Both, in their own way, are deeply spiritual experiences though only one of them requires glow sticks.

And so I continue, oscillating happily between riverbank and rave floor, ignoring the ache in my knees and the faint whistling in my ears. Because once a raver, always a raver. It gets into the system, much like that groundbait smell in a fleece you’ve washed seven times and still can’t wear to Tesco. You don’t fight it. You accept it. You crack on. And if, one day, I’m found peacefully expired in a bivvy while a phantom 4/4 beat plays in my head, I’ll consider that a life very well lived.

With tackle already in the car there are few phrases sweeter to the angler’s ear than “midday finish.” It has the same magical properties as “free pint,” “go on then,” and “that’ll do nicely.” Forty-three hours neatly ticked off in the design studio, brain switched to standby mode, and before the boss could even finish saying “see you Monday,” The smaller rivers and streams were, sadly, still behaving like they’d just watched an action film and fancied a go themselves bank-high, angry, and intent on carrying away anything foolish enough to stand near them. 

So Plan A, B and most of C were abandoned. Enter the Warwickshire Avon: still full of herself, mind, but calming down just enough to look fishable rather than murderous. A rare and beautiful compromise. Roving tactics were the order of the day. No seat box, no bivvy, no unnecessary items such as comfort or dignity. Just a loaf of bread, a lump of cheesepaste with the aroma of a French dairy gone rogue, and the quiet optimism that only an angler can muster after a working week.

The river had that look about it, the sort of look that suggests common sense should prevail and the flask lid should remain firmly screwed shut. It was up and banging through, shoulders hunched against its own momentum, dragging winter detritus along as if in a foul mood and in no hurry to apologise for it. I’d expected the stretch to be mine, entirely and indulgently so, but there was already evidence that another soul had questioned their own judgement as severely as I was questioning mine. Who, after all, is stupid enough to fish in these conditions? Apparently, at least two of us. Thankfully the other was a wildfowler on reccy. 

Still, I know this piece of water rather well. Intimately, in fact. Like an ex-girlfriend whose habits you never quite forget, even when you wish you could. For all the river’s bluster and chest-beating there are little places where it softens, pauses, takes a breath. Slacks that sit there quietly, pretending they aren’t exactly where a chub would want to be when everything else is in a bad temper. That knowledge alone was enough to keep me honest as I set up, despite the wind that had teeth and the sort of rain that never really commits but somehow always leaves you damp and faintly miserable.

I settled into what I consider the best slack on the stretch, the sort of swim you’d happily defend in court. Cheesepaste went on the hook, cheesy garlic bread crammed dutifully into the feeder, and I convinced myself that patience was going to be rewarded. Half an hour passed. Nothing. Not a tremor, not a suggestion, not even the courtesy of a false alarm. The tip might as well have been painted on. Eventually realism won out over optimism, and it was time to shoulder the gear and start roving.

Swim after swim told the same story. I lingered longer than usual, partly out of stubbornness and partly because conditions like these don’t lend themselves to quick fixes. If a chub was at home, it was going to take its time answering the door. But the tip remained obstinately lifeless, and with each move the wind seemed to find a new angle from which to make its presence felt. You begin to question your bait, your rig, your sanity, and eventually your entire angling philosophy.

Down towards the end of the stretch there’s a likely little slack, close in, easy to overlook when the river’s quieter but worth a dabble when it’s throwing its weight around. By now the sun was slipping away, low and unhelpful, shining directly into my eyes with all the sympathy of a pub landlord at closing time. Ten minutes in, just as I was considering another move, the tip gave two sharp, unmistakable pulls. Instinct took over. I struck, lifted into a solid fish, and for a brief, ridiculous moment allowed myself to believe.

Reality, as it often does, arrived promptly. I knew almost immediately it wasn’t the fish I wanted. A chub, yes, but a little rascal rather than the bar-of-soap six-pounder I’d been daydreaming about. Still, a fish is a fish is a fish, and the blank was avoided. There’s always comfort in that, even if it’s a slightly hollow one.

With time running out, optimism made one last appearance and suggested a return to the best slack. It had, after all, been primed for a good hour and looked as good as it ever would. Sadly, if there was a decent chub in residence, it was clearly on holiday. A final move to a hard, snag-ridden swim followed the sort you fish knowing full well it might end badly, but unable to resist the “what if”.

Fifteen minutes later, without so much as a bite, I lifted the rod and felt that horrible, unmistakable dead weight. The feeder and the entire rig were well and truly stuck, embraced by a snag with no intention of letting go. A few cautious tugs became firmer ones, and eventually there was nothing for it but to pull for a break. Lost the lot. Bugger.

So that was that. Cold, damp, slightly irritated, but not blanked. No gold at the end of the rainbow this time, just the quiet satisfaction of having read the water as best I could and had it answer back, if only briefly. And somehow, despite everything, already thinking about when I might next go back and have another go.

Anyway if you want a fishing podcast to listen too and don't fancy fishing in these crap conditons give fellow blogger Gale Light the Essex Scribbler podcasts a listen !!. Better not tell The Chubmeister General on this one, that I've been using pastry in my cheespaste he won't be happy !!.