Not happy, ones gooseberry bush ready to harvest, bowl in hand ready for picking, ready for jam making. Errrrrr where the heck have they gone, there wasn't one left they were all gone, GONE !!!.
They were all ready to burst as well so whatever nicked them braved the bush's defence and picked them off one by one. Considering I've had it for 10 years or so that has never happened before. A quick Google, the culprit could be anything from a fox, squirrel, blackbird or a pigeon.
Anyway talking about being taken for a mug I've been done over twice by a chub in this swim. The first time a few years ago when fishing with Sam, a proper bully of a Chevin nearly took the rod out the rest when it picked up a cheesepaste offering and tried to burry itself in the far side thicket.
Sadly with me hanging on to dear life with the rod bent double trying to prevent the fish getting wedged in the subsurface branches, I had an unfortunate hook-pull !!!. I rarely have them when fishing for Chub, because once the hook has its hold they rarely come out. This one time it did though and unfortunately I didn't get to see the fish that did me over good and proper.
Chub can be proper hard fighting fish when they want to be because the fight can vary considerably from a wet lettuce to a Chris Eubank where kidney punches reign down and forearms over the head offer no defence whatsoever. You just have to grin and bare it and wait for the chaos to let up before offering any kind of response yourself.
More recently though a terminal tackle failure put pay to the last lost fish in the aforementioned swim though, where shortly in to the fight this hard fighting big chub shot off to my right and was trying to get in to a fallen tree stumps and its tangle of branches with seconds of being hooked. With both hands on the rod trying to pull the fish away from the snag the rod which was bent down to the cork all of a sudden the line when slack and the fish was gone.
The knotless knot has unknotted itself under the pressure and I'm wondering if the large eye on the Size 6 Specimen hook and only 5lb flouro hooklink might have been the downfall. I rarely use hooklinks for Chub preferring to tie the hook directly to the mainline but a couple of days before I was using liver as hookbait so had rigged up a micro-lead clip set-up which needed a hook-link ideally because I was using a one ounce lead to keep the bloody offering on the bottom.
So I was back, this time though with bread as bait again but I'd alternate between fishing it on the bottom and also on the top. So a couple of SSG's could be pinched on the line to fish it on the deck if required and the hook tied direct to the line as I didn't want the same thing happening again. I didn't have long for this post work session but hopefully enough time to catch a fish or two.
The water level had dropped quite considerably since I was last here but also the sun was out so not exactly ideal, but this intimate section of the Warwickshire Avon offers quite a few swims to fish in a short roving distance so a couple of hours is all that is really needed to try and winkle out a fish.
After a fruitless half an hour in the swim I went for a rove in all but a couple of swims I could see the bottom so the river is back to gin clear again and the chub are cautious because of that.
I manged a couple of small chub off the top in one swim but nothing big was showing I dropped a piece of bread in a sheltered swim with overhanging trees with flow in the middle of the river and almost static either side.
Out of nowhere a group of chub five or six strong came out of the far bank cover and basically looked and starred at it, I'm talking a decent amount of time too. They were just not interested in even nudging it. The slow sinking approach again was ignored.
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