The Tiny River Alne - Drakefords and Daceatoriums

Well not a good start to the morning you see I went to the boost the heating for an hour and the digital programmer was dead, proper dead. Hmmm....I go downstairs to find that for some reason the power had tripped. Reset the trip switches and....

....sorted, fires up no problem, well I thought was all good until Sam pointed out that the garage door was open a couple of foot WTF !! On closer inspection the cause of the power tripping was all to see, you see some scumbag had cut through one of the outside security lights cable and obviously forced the garage door open somehow. 

Now my fishing chair was on the floor so I assume that was dislodged and hopefully dropped on their noggin.  Thankfully nothing was stolen or damaged from what I can see. That was the only the 2nd incident in 15 years but still very concerning, luckily my TFG River and Stream was still there. 

I've had to add another couple of security measures just in case they come back, hopefully they have looked what's inside the garage and that was good enough. 

I've actually left the whole garage door open for 3 nights by accident and it's such a quiet area and not had any issues. 

Anyway to get that fishing fix I had such a short window of piscatorial pursuitablity available to me I did wonder if I should bother or not. But the Alne has been pulling at ones angling strings of late and such is the convenience I might as well seize every opportunity I can.

That 12 ounce dace I caught may not be huge in many specimen anglers books, but for me fishing where I do, it was a clonking dace especially when there could well be some even bigger ones milling about.  

Apart from a handful of syndicate matches throughout the year I've got the stretch to myself, which means especially when certain swims are earmarked I know for sure there isn't going to be anyone in it. Now the 'daceatorium' swim not only threw up a nice fish for me, but one of the rare anglers I bumped in to here outside of the matches, said the match was won on that peg, yeap you guessed it with decent sized dace added to the winning seat box frequenters tally. 

Now with the fish hopefully getting back to some sort of normality having had to deal with not only flood water but also chilly water too, so I was hoping I would fair better this time in purist of these larger silver darts. Now this swim offers some shelter away from the flow, where right out in front of you it's almost static, so this time I decided to scale down a little and fish a pole float rather than a feeder. Some groundbait with a few maggots as feed and either bread or half a lobworm on the hook.

I was hoping fishing more match style might suit the intended quarry a little better and also concentrating feed around a tighter area was another change of tactic. What next live baiting with minnows ? Various angling literature I have mentions live baiting specifically, method in the madness ?

To be honest there is plenty of minnows here that's for sure, so that may well be worth a dabble in a future session if traditional tactics are not forthcoming. Now draconian rules here either and meddling Mark Drakeford's to worry about, so I could give it a go. Incidentally some roads in Stratford-Upon-Avon are now 20mph, I had two cyclists pass me the other day like I was standing still. I was in the Jimny after all to be honest they could probably muster up more horsepower. 

Anyway not happy that I got out far later than expected with Sam missing his bus meant that I was a good forty minutes later than expected. I had to get back in an hour and a half so not exactly a huge amount of fishing time,

It was clear from the first cast there were minnows in the swim and despite using a size 12 hook in the time I was there, I must have caught 5 or 6 of them and also a small gudgeon that despite the size of the bait, were determined to it in their gobs. 

I couldn't believe how much the water had changed since I was there last. Not only was it back to it's normal colour but it had dropped considerably and the water felt cold when mixing the groundbait. A quick measure, yeap it has dropped a considerable amount from 16 to just over 10 now.

I alternated between worms and maggots and the bigger fish were just not showing at all. The sensitive float picking up any indications from the minnows in quite a visible fashion.

The dace and chub for that matter just didn't seem to be in the swim. The problem was with my cerfew time (Wife going to Yoga) getting ever nearer I was hoping with the light now starting to fade, that the bigger fish needed to show up sooner than later.

And one did, you see the float slowly drifted from right to left and eventually dripped an inch so I decided to strike. Then all hell breaks lose because the fish on feeling the hooks bolted off downstream as a rate of knots with me trying to restrain its initial run. After turning it, oddly headed towards me and then turned and did another powerful run where this time the trout launched clear of the water, where the next bend of the rod it came off !!! 👿

I've mentioned before I've hooked and lost decent trout down here and this was another one of those. I've caught them to 2lb here but the more elusive bigger fish are easily twice that. 

2lb River Alne Trout - Warwickshire

So this was another one to add to the big trout lost tally (story of my life !!). And sadly that was that, you see after making carnage in the swim and with the light almost gone nothing else showed up apart from the pesky minnows again. 

After packing up and the rather lacklustre walk through the field back to the car all over a sudden to my left a noise in the thick grass where an otter was disturbed legged it past me straight in to the drink where at one point it was probably only 8-10 foot away. 

A decent sized one as well, hopefully the same one I saw the other day, however that one was more inquisitive where after popping its head up beside some lily pads, it proceeded to swim towards me and eventually went back under the water and made its way upstream.