Warwickshire Avon - Kid-Gloves and Kidology

What a waste of time that was, Sam you see expressed an interest to go fishing with me in the morning, well until the time was to go that is and he changed his mind. No persuading from me helped the cause either so in the end I went back to bed and had a rather nice lie-in.

Since I've come back from Spain though I've been off the sauce and I always sleep better where over the last few days I've had three nights of near 8 hours of sleep 🙌

Those sort of sleep is very unusual for me where 6-7 hours is the norm. I feel much better for it mind you so maybe I'll keep the abstinence going for a least till next weekend anyway.

With the gear packed though and weather about to turn as the hours passed I decided to get some peace and head down to the river anyway and do what I had intended to do with the tangleator.

That was to visit the aquarium sorry 'gonk' swim to try and winkle out a gudgeon or two. The problem was I could see the fish in the super clear water and the maggot munchers were queuing up to get hold of the hunger quellers.

So before I got the hang of catching the gudgeon on the float I had to wade through small dace, roach and tiny chub. Obviously a minnow or two and a 1lb perch that evaded the hook as I was trying to land it. The key was to fish the float well overdepth and also move one of the shot an inch from the hook.

Then they started queuing up and I retained a few in the landing net. A pike was hanging around with the gudgeon swimming around in the bottom of the net. I knew if I wasn't in plain sight in the gin clear water it would have attacked the net no problem. No the biggest of gudgeon but plenty of sport. 

Now after my quote of gudgeon I decided to head up stream and try and catch a chub off the top where some were showing the last time I was here. A couple didn't take long to show either, the problem was the more convenient swim to catch them they spook off faster than my mate Hilly when it's his round. 

So I had to drift some bread down from a swim around 20 years downstream. Not a problem usually but with the river really low those reeds were proud of the river. Anyway yes you guessed it I managed to hook a decent chub get it out from the thick cover to the left and get it out in to the main flow.

The problem despite me giving it as much side strain as I dared it swim straight in to the reeds and ended up getting stuck solid. It did me over good and proper with the end result was a couple of reeds pulled straight out of the river and me kicking the ground in frustration. The fish was long gone sadly and these sort of rivers, the shoal if there was one had long gone. I do love gudgeon though, plenty of character that need to be handled with kid-gloves in these conditions.