The Tiny River Alne - Otters, Cormorants and Herons'

A Christmas day of excesses on the food and drink front it was nice to rove the banks of the handy river Alne especially when it was lovely and misty out there and not that cold.

The problem for me was that being biteless in the first swim opposite the house usually means a tough session on the river. Then things got worse, you see after entering the the 2nd field I disturbed some cormorants in their roost and also some rather large herons.

 Hmmm....

...and it got worse too because in the third swim I fished I noticed out the corner of my eye a disturbance in the water downstream which I thought might have been a duck, however around 10 seconds later an otter popped its head out of the water, saw me and then proceeded to swim underwater right through my swim, with bubbled galore.

For the next 4 hours I must have disturbed another 5 feeding cormorants, where two popped out the same swim at the same time just yards from me and flew off in disgust. 

For such a small river, the amount of piscine predators really was quite staggering and after 8 or 9 biteless swims demoralising for me as an angler too, because I fear for the fish that live in here mainly because it sees little foot traffic and they are going to be largely left undisturbed to do what the hell they want to do.

I even ventured to the swims at the middle of the stretch to try and get at least one fish to bite but there was nothing doing whatsoever. A boxing day kick in the balls, not good at all 😬