Warwickshire Stour - Rhypophagy and Rhinotillexomania

As a solitude seeker especially in these 'testing' times there is nothing more therapeutic for ones mind than small river chub fishing. Now the Avon was still chocolate brown and bombing through but a quick check of the levels the Stour was very much fishable.

Recently Nic had managed to catch a lovely roach well over the pound from the stretch we both had been fishing and for this 3.5 hour short dawn morning session a roach of that stamp would be nice.

Now the Stour is very much the same as it winds itself through open countryside but the river can vary so much in depth, width and features along its journey to where it exits at the Warwickshire Avon.

The colour is often a lovely green colour and it hardly changes from this despite floods or droughts. I'm sure the fish feel confident because of this and bites can be forthcoming due to the clarity. It was up quite a bit when I fished it last but still well within the banks and plenty of fishable swims.

Despite the air temperature being 10 degrees the wind was bitter and was playing havoc with the light quiver top. Trotting might have been the better option but even that might have only been possible in handful of swims along the stretch.

Like any small river, fish show them shows quite quickly if the bait is presented well and I alternated between bread and worm and got plenty of bites. Not the biggest of fish admittedly but bites are bites and its surprising just how little you think about in these sort of sessions, and the wellbeing is boosted because of that.  

I started at the bottom of the stretch and made my way up and dropped in to every likely looking swim. Here the fish are a smaller stamp as the bottom end and larger at the top. I'm not sure why that is to be honest, but it appears that way from my findings. 

The bigger chub were nowhere to be seen half way in to the session and after spending nearly an hour in the swim Nic caught the decent roach, I had an hour left to try and catch a proper rod puller.

A snaggy swim with a slack provided a bite really quick but I lost the fish nearing the net and it felt a proper chub that reside here. Usually if you lose a fish that way you won't get another bite so I was surprised when another fish fell to to the bread disk within 5 minutes of getting the bait out again.

Bread seemed to out-fish the worm so I stuck to the white stuff for the second half of the session. Not the biggest of Chub at 2 1/4 lb but lots of fun on light tackle I use for this sort of river.

No more fish from that swim so I walked back to the very upstream part of the stretch where its a little more overgrown to see if the bigger chub wanted cover over their heads but despite looking like it would produce a bite, neither of the two swims I tried  did sadly.

The banks are slippy at the minute and after a misplaced foot on the slippy mud I went a cropper with all my tackle and fell right on my side !!! luckily no damage done but with the session almost over anyway, I made haste before any other misfortune with damaged pride and a wet net.

I didn't stumble upon my lost scales but luckily I managed to buy another set for a tenner from Ebay including the p&p, they are in better nick than the last ones, so after kicking myself after I lost them, the boy done good.