Warwickshire Avon - Hysteria and Hirquitalliency

I didn't believe the wife when she said via her social media that many of the local supermarkets were running out of certain items. Hand sanitizer and even the staple goods such as bog roll and pasta had their shelves plundered and now bare I thought she was having me on.

But my God she was right, the picture below from my local Tesco. The hysteria over this Coronavirus is simply staggering, you do wonder what would happen in these modern times if we actually had a crisis on our hands, it beggars belief we have these people living amongst us, those that think world war three is coming or something.

Anyway with the staple bottles of porter and ingredients for a spicy prawn curry it was on to matters at hand away from the madness.

Luckily some sanity and sanctuary could be found down at a stretch of the Warwickshire Avon that is a haven for wildlife. It's a twitchers wet dream, in-fact here the bird life seems to grow year on year and when your sat waiting for a bite there is so much to watch and take in, the fishing become secondary to the surroundings.

This, the silver bream stretch I lost a decent Pike recently so for this session I thought I'd sit it out in a few swims to see if I could find the fish that I hooked.

Pike, especially big'uns tend to like an area and stay in it, and you can see why they would like it here. There are plenty of prey fish to keep stomachs full. The session recently I'd fished here oddly I've not had any bream but I'd caught some nice roach and also a few half decent Chub.

So some double dipping, a rod with cheesepaste and a rod with smelt where I'd fish the margins and close to cover.

There are Zander he too but they tend to show at night where luckily I can fish a private stretch with Nic from Avon Angling UK.

All along this stretch there is cover and it has some depth to it as well. The plan was to fish 4 swims and before I started the session I put a few morsels of cheesepaste in each swim to be fished. The last time I was here I caught 3 pike if I recall, but is was the fish I lost that was preying on the back of my mind.

I hate losing fish especially if I haven't seen what I hooked, sadly more of that later.

I don't mess around with my morsels of cheesepaste, large chunks of it seem to do the trick for the Chub where I'm sure they don't think twice about picking it up, the bites tend to be violent you see. Bread on the other hand they can test it with their lips first rather than swallowing it down as quickly as they can.

With nothing to lose after an hour without a bite on either rod I cast the cheesepaste in to the middle of the river. It's around 8 foot or so here with a clean bottom, so the thought was any passing fish making use of this motorway could be up for a pit stop.

About fifteen minutes of the bait being out I got a bite, a good one as well and I soon hooked in to a fish.

At first I thought it was a decent Chub but then it decided to pull back properly and pull back properly it did. I literally could not do anything about it on my light'ish Chub gear. It took me upstream and was taking line like no Chub had ever done before.

It headed for a snag, a snag that it knew was there because as soon as it got to where it wanted to be the line broke. A clean break and it came back minus the entire rig, me wondering what the hell was that.

A carp, a pike or massive chub, sadly I didn't get to see it.

I did get to see one of the resident Otters in close quarters though, bold as brass in broad daylight. He was patrolling the margins with a wave of bubbles as they do after dumping a half a pound perch off to eat later.

At one point after it popped its head out of the water it must have been less than 6 foot away from me. It's only really when you see it in such circumstances you realise just what an apex predator it is. An impressive predator close up, I certainly wouldn't want to be a fish when it's on the hunt. It would be like a cougar on patrol in Coventry's Fatty Arbuckles.