Warwickshire Avon - Dhansak's and Deuteragonists

I've always been a lover of home cooked curries for a start you know exactly what's gone in to it but there are also so simple to cook as well and this one a simple chicken Dhansak is Soooooooooooooo Goddamn tasty. The sweet and sour nature of the sauce and the texture of the lentils its probably up there with one of my favourites if I'm honest especially as its so easy to make. 

Anyway when I was tucking in to this latest spicy offering Chub or Barbel ?, Chub or Barbel ? Errrrrr Chub me'thinks 

Now experience teaches success can never be guaranteed, no amount of knowledge about water, fish, techniques, or baits can do that. So aim at achieving some standard of consistency throughout the season and accept some degree of failure as inevitable. Angling ability is not necessarily related to the amount of time you spend fishing. The angler who fishes perceptively can learn more in one season than the angler who spends a lifetime fishing aimlessly. 

Do not think you are a better angler than someone else merely because you have caught a bigger chub, or more chub. The best fish you catch will not necessarily be the biggest, nor will it always require greater skill to catch than chub of lesser weight. Understanding of fish and water is far more important than knowledge of methods and baits and far more difficult to acquire. 

So devote some of your time to learning all you can about the movements and feeding habits of chub in your chosen waters. Your angling will then improve in proportion to your increasing knowledge of the species. Do not assume that lack of success means that chub are not feeding. 

The fault is just as likely to lie in your choice of swim, tackle, bait or in plain bad timing. Learn to mould yourself to the ways of fish, and do not expect that they will always behave as you think they should. 

If success does not come quickly and it usually does not do not lose heart. 

Try again and keep on trying until you do succeed, or at least until you are able to establish why you are failing. 

The knowledge and understanding you acquire from personal experience will be invaluable but do not scorn the in-formation you can gain from books, which can be of immense value as the distillation of many years of experience by experts in the art. Fish always on the assumption that no matter how much you learn there will remain much that you do not know and make up your mind right from the start that you want to catch chub and only chub. 

The catching of just one chub will then mean more to you in terms of progress than the catching of a hundred-weight of other unwanted species. It is better to catch nothing than to catch fish you do not want or had not intended to. Mention of the part that instinct plays in successful angling is usually greeted with scepticism but after many years of patient perceptive fishing, swim selection, approach, choice of method and bait do all become more or less instinctive. 

You become sensitive to a river's every mood and in your mind's eye can travel over its every twist, bend and curve in its course, seeing everything as clearly as if you were actually there. 

When you have reached that stage and when the other essentials of successful angling have been mastered you can begin to feel that you have 'arrived'. Successful angling for chub or for any chosen fish, for that matter could indeed be likened to the bringing together of many different strands of coloured wool, each strand representing a vital factor for success. 

Now only when these different strands have been fused together can you fish in that confident, almost instinctive way that brings consistent success. It can be a long, even a hard road, but it is well worth treading to reach the goal of the complete chub angler. 

Am I a complete Chub angler, errrrr nope, but I really do love fishing for them and learning new techniques to try and outwit these sometimes hard to catch fish.

Bread and bread only was the order of the day and I use gobstopper sized pieces especially when the water has a nice tinge of colour like it did for this session. I was greeted to a deserted river and the colour looked spot on for a bite or two. The first swim I had a bite straight away  and it felt a decent fish too.What I didn't expect though when the rod was bend double and I was trying to bully the fish from a snag was that the knotless knot failed 😕

I think that has only happened to me once before but after losing that fish and kicking myself when looking at a piece of bedraggled line without a hook I didn't get to see what was on the end.

The next swim a pike picked up the bread and it was holding bottom til it released it from its clutches. Hmmm not a good start. There are always chub here to catch though so it didn't take long to get the next fish. Not a huge chub but so what, I love catching them when they are in this scraping mood. 

I caught 4 in the end I think, and they were all up for feeding on the bottom. I did try floating bread on a few swims but only had a rise in one of those and it ignored it when ones hooked was buried in it. 

Still an enjoyable morning despite the light rain and having to wade through nettles in many of the swims. All being well I'll be out tomorrow as well this time I will fish in to dark I think, I need something bigger because my results have been mediocre of late.