Warwickshire Avon - Cockles and Consequentialism

Some of the chub that frequent this section of the Avon are colossal, so colossal in-fact I've never got them out of my mind. 

In one particular session when feeding some freebie surface bread to the waiting Chevin in the swim to try and get them to be readily accepting of bait before a hook went on, a group of three appeared from nowhere and from under ones polarised sunglasses I could see the stature of them.

The were huge, proper jaw dropping Chub, 5lbers you say ? nope these were 6 plus'ers all day long, hell, maybe getting on to 7lb such their ponderous paunchy. 

Could I catch them, errrr no, in-fact I've seen them again a few times now but just cannot get one on the end of my hook.

I even had one of the big'uns come up in the water to inspect the floating crust for what seem like an age, but having been literally millimetres away from the bait with its nose it pulled away at the last second and returned to where it whence came. 

The smaller fish like it here too though that's one of the issues and once one of the humdrum is caught after the disturbance the swim is dead, the fish just vanish. Now tell a lie, I did have one of the fish eject the bait before the hook could be set but that's as close as I have been to getting on the six list.

So I was back for a slight change of tactic for this session, it was out with the speci waggler where I'd trot down a bread disk or lobworm 

The problem was work finished far later than expected and with the Wife off to Yoga I only had about an hour and a half to fish. Still I was only planning to fish this one swim really anyway so not a huge problem. 

Further downstream are some nice elevated swims where you can trot big baits and I could have ended up down there I suppose if things were not going well. The river is back to clear again however it's still up a little so when I got to the river it was very oxygenated indeed but I've seen some big Barbel and the big Chub here and they don't seem to mind it to be fair.

Some floating pieces of bread usually bring some fish up from the depths but not this time. In-fact under the polarised sunglasses I couldn't spot any fish at all apart from the odd minnow. Hmmmmm, anyway I alternated between lobworm and bread trot after trot, pass after pass but nothing for an hour or so.

More floating bread again, nothing, where were the fish ?

I went for a wander downstream and a couple of Barbel anglers were biteless, the only other angler on the stretch I walked was catching small dace on maggots but even for him it was quiet. I returned back to the swim for the final fifteen or so minutes but this time spotted a huge dark silhouette, one of them was in situ. 

Could I tempt it though, nope, bread and lobworm spooked it and even after managing to get a bait right in front of it's mouth it did an about-turn and disappeared out of sight. I could have stayed there for hours and hours and the same outcome me thinks, a blank. Still not all lost they've not been washed away in the floods, at least that's something.

I'll catch one some day, watch this space....