Warwickshire Avon – Bet your bottom Doctor

As a busy family man this is the first weekend in a few where I’d actually had some spare time to fish, I’d managed a dusk Barbel session a few days ago and the Chub poka-yoke rig worked well yet again as the swim must have been full of the greedy blighters but the Barbel were suspicious in their absence and that 4ft twitch didn’t materialise in that dark hour after dusk. The Avon is still low and gin clear again so for this extended weekend session I was umming and ahhing on what species to fish for.

Until I stumbled upon a post on social media……

Now I’m not a facebook user personally but I do have a few bookmarks stored in my phone to various pages of local angling clubs and societies and it was whilst having a butchers at one last week I noticed a Tench was caught during a match in a location I’d fished a few times albeit for another species and I knew in the past had some form . So it was decided for me, I thought I’d try and capture one of those rare and elusive Warwickshire Avon river Tench.

I always plan my sessions and make up my rods before I go so it was a two rod approach for this session, a sleeper rod with a helicopter set-up with couple of highly visible fake sweetcorn on a hair, with the block end feeder filled with red bloodworm ground bait, a few red maggots, some hemp and a few kernels of corn and the main Avon rod I’d fish a Drennan bolt feeder with red maggot as feed and three on the hook, one fake and two wrigglers.

It’s surprisingly deep here having fished it before and it can take more than a few seconds for the lead to dink the bottom. The flow is also pedestrian which suits the Tinca and the margins have lilies and cabbages, it’s about as Tenchy as all the places I fish. The Tench reccy session I had recently was further downstream and if they were there they certainly didn’t want to show themselves even though I offered them a slap up Sunday dinner with all the trimmings.

Would I fare any better in my second Tench session………?

Well what a stupid question, of course not. I forgot my groundbait which didn’t help but upon arriving at 6.20am or so I found the peg where the Tench was caught and the one I wanted to fish occupied, bugger. I walked upstream but couldn’t see any pegs that took my fancy so I ended up a couple of pegs down from where the other angler was.

I caught plenty of fish, Perch, Roach and Dace but nothing of size and after I was bitten off by a jack pike and again by a bigger pike that liked the roach I’d caught I called it a day. Incidentally not even a liner on the sleeper rod. I suspect a sizeable net of fish could be caught if that’s your sort of thing. There is some rain this week so the little Tinca’s can wait, hopefully the water will colour up a nadger , I’ve some big fat lobworms in the post and the Perch are calling.