Warwickshire Avon - Acrobats' and Aberuncators

With another road blocked by the activists from Insulate Britain, luckily for them the Police who haven't got the best trust from the public of late, in-fact to put it bluntly reputation is in tatters (No Words 😕) were on route to deal with the situation reinforced by tea and custard creams.

The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis washing her hands with it all, well she has a cast iron pension to maintain. Still the sunrise was quite something, the all consuming world long forgotten. 

Now believe it or not the humble custard cream is Britain's most dangerous biscuit, it was revealed sometime ago. The study claimed an estimated 25million people in Britain had been injured by biscuits. Hidden dangers included flying fragments and daredevil dunking in scalding tea. And it seemed custard creams were the worst offenders, posing the biggest risk to innocent dunkers.

Around 500 people a year need hospital treatment because of biscuit injuries.

The study found 29 per cent of adults had been splashed or scalded by hot drinks while dunking or trying to fish the remnants from hot tea. They also found 28 per cent had choked on crumbs and 10 per cent had broken a tooth or filling biting a biccy.

More unusually, three per cent had poked themselves in the eye with a biscuit and seven per cent were bitten by a pet or "other wild animal" trying to get their biscuit. One man ended up stuck in wet concrete after wading in to pick up a stray biscuit.

Mindlab who conducted the study devised a Biscuit Injury Threat Evaluation, or B.I.T.E. Custard creams get a risk rating of 5.63.

If you don't believe me you can read it here !!! 

Now for this short morning session down at the Warwickshire Avon where Pike and Perch reside in good numbers custard creams were the snacket of choice, but they would mind mannered hopefully unlike the unruly Pike with a jaw full of razor sharp teeth.

You see when I started out fishing for Pike their fearsome reputation had me worrying about how I would deal with them once caught. But its all about knowledge and experience and I quickly learnt that the Pike is a very delicate species and they need to be respected and cared for properly when out of the water.  

 

It's all about being prepared for every eventuality and now handing Pike isn't an issue at all. 

To be honest some learning from Youtube and the like on handling and unhooking was well worth binge watching because it didn't take me long to get up to speed.

Now before the close of play of last season I managed a nice 12lber that had taken a liking for the smelt and I thought that was a decent fish, well, to fair it was as it was big enough to break my PB at the time. What I didn't expect was that I'd catch a 13lber in the closed season on the cut during my Zander quest though. 

This unhooking mat from Korum was well worth buying as it allows the Pike to move around without fear of damage. You still have to be close by but the upstands help with the containment even from the most acrobatic of flings and flips. 

I fancied being a little more active for this session though so I'd fish a lure (Savage Gear Gravity Crank) as well as my standard overdepth float set-up with a smelt underneath. The weather was going to turn from light to heavy rain sometime during the session so I was hoping being a little more mobile if it did finally hit, and it wouldn't take me long to pack-up and get back to the car.

Now I haven't been down here but it really is a rather nice place to be. You see there is always so much to see here when waiting for the float to bob the alarm to sound. The river was up but still gin clear and I knew it would be tough. You see Pike fishing for me tends to start from January and there is a good reason for that, and that is because I basically don't do any good. 

What I didn't expect though fifteen minutes in to the session the smelt is getting interest and a bite develops. At first nothing much happened with the float almost staying in position but with the odd bobble, but then a proper run develops.

The fish was taking the float to the right and then it buried right under, I tightened the clutch on the reel and wound down to the circle hook and felt some decent resistance. 

But then the first initial run with what felt like a decent fish the rod went from one with a good bend in it, to one with no fish on the end. Damn, not sure what happened there but despite getting the bait back out again nothing else materialised in that swim where I left the bait for an hour or so. I move the bait off the bottom to try and induce a take but nothing doing at all.

I fully expected to get a perch or a jack at least on the lure, but no, cast after cast no interest whatsoever. I even tried sink and draw on a deadbait in a couple of other swims but even that was fruitless. All very odd because I rarely blank here even if its a perch or two.

The last half an hour I changed to a Zebco frog and literally the first cast a Pike had come up and broke the surface. A decent fish as well but again after that initial interest it never came back for another go.

So a blank, not unexpected if I'm honest because when the water is as clear as this I've always found the predators can be off form. Maybe a livebait would have been the way to go but that is easy to say after the event isn't it, but I'm sure that would have been the better option. Now I've some lobworms that turned up yesterday and with the Alne now at a decent fishable level I fancy some small water fishing and I've not been there for a while but it always fishes ok when the levels are a little more than a trickle.