Warwickshire Avon -Teetotallers and Tetrakishexahedrons

Apparently the average angler has a collection of 673 floats and 4,258 bits of float with which he intends to do something with one of these days. Now out of the 673 floats he uses two, and the rest are for playing with.

Among the transitional games played are:

Soldiers On Parade. The floats are lined up in rows, graded according to size, graded again and according to colour, picked up one by one, drooled over, and again and then put back down again.

The Money I've Spent. Each float is assessed at its retail price and the total added up. The angler works out the final sum in terms of pints of draught ale or maggots for the teetotallers. Then he breaks down and cries !!!

Bobbing In the Bath. This is a great advance on the old-fashioned rubber duck. Before a bath, you prepare several floats by tying a small length of weighted line on the bottom of each. When these are floating around the bath with you, you reach under the water, tug at a line, and see the float disappear as if a gigantic fish has taken it. An advanced version of the game uses hooks on the end of the line, but this is not recommended to beginners who wish to avoid doing themselves a mischief. 

Now by making your own floats at home you can save pounds and finish up with floats which look just as good as the shop bought ones, even though they do have a tendency to get waterlogged and sink after the first ten minutes.

There are so many different kinds of float that it would be outside the scope of this blog to attempt any detailed instruction in float making. And it's dead boring anyway, well unless you study the illustrations of the revolutionary Piscatorial Quagswagging range of floats, Kit's for these, with full instructions, are available for only £35.88p each. Here a small selection.

Anyway enough of that guff on to the Warwickshire Avon chub where my quest for a 6lber continues. I'd not been down this neck of the woods for ages and this would be a session of two parts, where the first I'd feed some small balls of mashed bread and trot some breadflake to try and intercept a chub. Then the second part fish static in to dusk and beyond where hopefully the bigger chub would show themselves.

When the flow is pedestrian I do like fishing a short chubber float especially with some of the long trots this section has because the extra weight and girth just seems to suit the conditions. 

I've noticed in these low clear conditions those larger Chevin just seem to be absent in those areas they usually show. Here there is plenty of character for the fish to find sanctuary and I was hoping one or two would show up for this short smash and grab session. 

I really should have put the lure rod in the car because when I got bankside the predator activity was quite ridiculous, with not just perch which showed up last time I was here but also Pike.  

After moving from a biteless swim after feeding bread eventually the float went straight under and a fish was on. Now when chub show up here they are usually good'uns (quite a few 5lbers) but disappointment when the fish was splashing around on the surface on the first lift of the rod.

Yeap a small chublet sadly and after trotting till I couldn't see the float it was clear it was going to be a hard session.

Still the moon was nice and vibrant and I still had the prebaited swim to fish which was next to an overhanging tree. As soon as the bait hit the deck a sharp pull on the tip eventually pulled nicely round but I was rather premature on the strike, but it didn't take long to get another bite, where I had the same result.

Yeap a chublet of similar stamp succumbed to the bread, hmmmm 🙁 the temp had dropped considerably by this point with my breath clearly visible. So I gave it another 20 minutes without another nibble and headed back home rather disappointed.