Warwickshire Avon - Cathetometers and Cataclysms

If your mood has turned grey like my hair (30 years ago !!!), along with this winter weather after Christmas and in to 2023, it's time to bake a pie and cure your February blues. Now my minced beef and onion pie with healthier puff pastry with mashed potatoes and peas was polished off before the loggerhead battle commencement.

It's hearty and warming and full of comfort, just as I remember as a kids being as savoury as you like, with the slight sweetness of the onions, and a perfect midweek tea after the drudgery. You see the last trip to a clearing Warwickshire Avon a big chub did me over good and proper and some decent grub was needed because the feel good factor I'm sure may well be lacking when I finally got fishing.  

The Avon when it's clear can be very tough indeed, catch results really can be night and day excuse the pun but that's the crux of the matter.  Thankfully as a working man shackled to a computer for much of the week, fish at the right time at the right place those odds to catch a fish can often be reduced.

So for this session at the stretch of convenience on route to the swim I'd feed some mashed bread in to the slack the chub gave me the Ali shuffle and would fish that swim on return to the car. With dusk getting further away at least as we go forward I can now arrive before the sun sets. 

In my experience though it's definitely worth drifting some bread on the surface in these conditions as they are often up for some surface action. 

With snowdrops visible on-route and some about to burst through when I got there I hot footed to the river as I didn't have much time. The river is clear as I said but there is some depth to this slack and I got a piece of break flake out straight away to see if there was anything at home before I'd add some mash to pre-bait. 

Anyway to cut a long story short, a series of calamities' 

• Within a couple of minutes a pull and then a really fast bite where I felt the weight of the fish, however a pike I assume has picked up the wafting bread a foot off the bottom and engulfed the rig, leaving me with a foot of frayed line and having to set-up again.
• Then the next swim a flick of the bread in to a slack just off the crease an 'unmissable' chub bite caught me off guard and yeap, I missed it but it felt the point of the hook !!! then all want dead. 
• The banker swim now that produces at dusk, a quiet 20 minutes waiting out in the wind and then out of nowhere a bite so I struck in to a fish, felt it on for a few seconds and then the reel locks up and I realise the line must have got wrapped round the tip in the wind and the bleeding thing is now an inch shorter, and the eye is now giving the grippa stop a hug !!
• Oh and I knelt in some stingers in the first swim, still tingling now as I type this !!

I did fish a couple more swims without success, just one of those sessions where after the first disaster I shouldn't have known that was the writing on the wall.

Damn, with precious fishing time a wasted 2 hour session, especially when I had some bites, oh well these things happen from time to time don't they. 

One saving grace I didn't fall in the river !!!!