Warwickshire Avon - Petrichor and Petaurists

<-----motivation to go fishing---------------------------------------------Mick----->

However, yesterday YES !!!! fantastic the smell of rain for once, we've not had that for AGES !!! Breathe In DEEPLY and AGAIN !!! and boy did it bucket it down. Well over an hour I tell thee, with thunder and lightning mixed in with it. I fully expected the Alne to be well up, but no, a <30cm jump of its levels its dropped again to almost where it was before.

Still I'm not going to lie, I did a little dance over it !!! well ok a couple of fist pumps !!! As I type this its 17 degrees outside and 20 inside, happy days, just that cooler air filtering through has perked me up a little and ones fishing mojo. 

Now Petrichor is the name given to the scent of the Earth after precipitation or as we often refer to it, the smell of rain. 

The word originates from the Greek "petra," meaning "stone," and "ichor," a reference to the golden fluid or blood that flows in the veins of the Gods and immortals in Greek mythology. 

Many natural clay pots emit a fragrance similar to rain when we sprinkle water on them. This scent emission is a property of many types of dry clays and soils.

 

The smell-of-rain phenomenon has been a mystery for quite a while and has not yet been entirely resolved. 

It seems when a raindrop hits a porous surface, it traps tiny air bubbles at the point of contact. These air bubbles are released as aerosols and feature a mixture of minerals and decomposed organic material.

Decomposed organic material gets blown from dry soil and lands on rocks. 

When air is dry and there's no rain, the chemical mixture of organic components and minerals remains in the soil and rocks. 

This signals plants to prevent seeds from sprouting and roots from growing due to the lack of water.

We also now know why this unique scent is everywhere around the world, why things smell like rain pretty much the same everywhere around the world, and why the fragrance is familiar to everyone. 

Petrichor is thought to attract camels to oases and signal river and lake fish that it's time to spawn. 

We do know that we can smell it better than sharks smell blood and that only a few molecules per trillion molecules of air are needed for us to be able to detect this smell. So, petrichor is millions of times more potent than most other odours we can smell, well apart from some of my post curry leakages. 

Thankfully a proper curry house curry is less than a week away where I'm hoping my pores will be overloaded with garlic and my taste buds tickled and tantalised by some chilli peppers . You see I've missed some spice of late and a little like ones fishing I need to get back in to the routine and tick the sessions off.

For this short smash and grab I'd bait up a swim for a Barbel with hemp and pellets and then try and catch a chub off the top, before returning to the pre-baited swim to fish a boilie over the freebies with the addition of a PVA bag. 

Dusk is at 9.00pm which means I can fish in to dark and return home in time to share some sofa time with the good lady Wife. Fellow syndicate member Dave W was bankside when I got there having caught a nice 6 lb bream and he like me would stay in to dusk to try and catch a barbus.

No chub rising to take the bread in 5 or 6 swims, something wasn't right !!! to cut a long story short myself and Dave left with our tails between our legs. Not even any club pulls for me despite fishing well in to dark. Dave was wearing a hat as he was so cold, the overnight temperature drop was considerable, excuses at the ready. I might even trot some maggots just to get a bite !!!

On to the next one !!!