The Tiny River Alne – Rutilus and Rhypophagy

A busy petrol station, the first row of pumps down, a rather large lady clearly not shy round the buffet eventually unfolds herself from the car door and meanders to the pumps like a constipated wombat mimicking a slumbering sloth on the go slow. Eventually she undocks the nozzle and starts filling her car, the filling doesn’t last very long however because, after what seems like only a tenners worth of juice, she’s now shop bound.

Now the courteous thing to do would be to move forward to free the pump up, but oh know she’s got a hunger to quell and a body to maintain, 'time waits for no man'. The shelves perused over and over again, up and down, back for more and eventually she’s waddled out of the shop and car bound after what seems like an eternity with a whole load of big belly and backside creators in her clutches.

Her food fix is needed urgently though, so only NOW she decides to pull forward to free the pump and to relieve the Wife of her rage and a feeling of cleithrophobia. Yeap rather than leave the forecourt she needs her food fix ‘RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW’ !!!!. Hands like shovels a large packet of Doritos has never been consumed so quickly.

The Wife’s fills up and pays at the pump luckily just as the delightful young lady drives off, as I felt like their might an enactment of Falling Down on the cards and I’d have one of the starring roles.

Grumpy Old Git, you bet'ya !!!

Luckily fishing helps with controlling ones trigger finger, just that little bit of much needed solitude keeps it all in check, keeps the stars aligning as they should.

Now talking of solitude a little-known stretch of river hardly fished had one’s mind overly active in the week, dreams of colossal roach, monstrous dace, troublesome trout and gargantuan carp luckily changed to the habitual dreams of tremendous tits.

I was in two minds what to fish for but with the roach featured of brobdingnagian proportions they were my target for this evening sessions. If there redfins were that big in years gone by, could they still be here.

This stretch will certainly be on my radar come wintertime, but having hardly trodden these pastures I wanted to have look at what could potentially be a water of interest for all manner of species. Now bread was being mullered by mischievous minnows so apart from the maggot rod I'd have a small quiver rod with a simple link ledger with some 6mm squidgy pellets to try, at least these would keep the hookbait intact without having to wonder if it was still there or not.

Uncharted, reticent, with its residents unknown, what’s not to like….

A previous reconnaissance mission by me and Sam the tangleator gave us a few pointers to we could expect and that sort of fitted in with my plans for this short session.

Now with the river level indicator kaput I only went on the rain we've been having and made a guess on what the levels would be like and yeap you guessed it, I'd guessed it wrong. It was still as low as ever which made the fishing tough. The farmer had been doing some cutting and clearing though, so more swims were accessible, and to be fair, getting to know this water better is also part of the longer term plan.

The fishing though was hard, usually trout would show but with around 5 or 6 swims fished without much more than minnow a few gudgeon and small dace it's one of those waters that I'm sure will fish completely different when there is some water on it. The river just looked lifeless to be honest and I'd not really got that feeling the other times I'd fished it.

The pellet didn't even get a nudge throughout the session the maggot mullered my minnow. So that's it for a while I think, even though I love fishing this sort of river, even I know when to leave it sort itself out.

Sam's T-Shirt created by Brian from Pikeblog available here....