Well, autumn has certainly decided to announce its arrival, and judging by the temperature the other morning on the way to work, it had clearly forgotten to send a polite letter first. One minute we were enjoying the seemingly endless summer, the next I was sitting in the car wondering whether I'd accidentally driven north and ended up somewhere considerably closer to the Arctic Circle. It was, in other words, bloody chilly.
I'm not complaining though, because as much as the long, drawn-out summer was rather pleasant, after several weeks of sunshine and absolutely bugger all rain it did begin to feel like we'd been permanently relocated to Spain. The grass was turning the colour of an old pair of khaki trousers and every time you looked at the river you could almost hear it asking someone to please turn the tap back on. We like our seasons in Britain, or at least I do, particularly the ones where the weather becomes increasingly unsuitable for normal people and increasingly attractive to anglers.
There is something rather satisfying about the arrival of autumn, even if it does mean wearing a winter jacket before going to work while wondering where you put the gloves you haven't seen since February. The rivers start to look different, the trees begin throwing their leaves into the water with gay abandon and suddenly you can justify wearing six layers of clothing simply because you're going fishing. It is a wonderful time of year, provided you aren't expected to actually enjoy being outside for anything other than fishing.
Getting out this week was always going to be slightly problematic, largely because the diary makers had been at it again and filled the bloody thing with commitments. There is also the small matter of having a child with special needs at home, which means that although Sam is perfectly capable of looking after his brother for a couple of hours, anything much longer than that is something neither of us feels entirely comfortable with. That's just the way it is, and fishing, despite what some head wand donners who don't live in our shoes believe, occasionally has to take second place to real life.
The good news is that things are changing as Sam gets older, and the wife and I can now actually go out for a meal together without having to organise what resembles a military operation involving timetables, contingency plans and even rarer babysitters. Sam has grown up considerably, and not just vertically, although he is now taller than me which I find deeply offensive on a personal level. He also understands that from time to time he has to be responsible for his brother, which is something that has made life just that little bit easier.
Anyway, with the wife out, the house was mine, and apparently this was considered an opportunity for me to prepare myself some food rather than simply standing in front of the fridge repeatedly opening the door in the hope that something interesting would appear. The suggestion was, and I quote, "Why not make yourself some fish or something spicy?" which I interpreted as an instruction rather than a casual culinary suggestion. Naturally, I went for the second option because apparently I enjoy making decisions that will later have consequences for everyone around me.
What followed was a proper old-school garlic chilli chicken, the sort of meal where the recipe should really come with a warning from the Health and Safety Executive. By the time I'd finished cooking, the kitchen looked like a small explosion had taken place inside a Chinese takeaway and then decided to have a second go. There were chopped chillies everywhere, garlic on every conceivable surface and enough washing-up left behind to make me seriously consider moving house.
It was, however, absolutely bloody delicious, which is really all that matters when you've reached the point where the kitchen looks like evidence from a crime scene. I consumed enough garlic to ensure that for the following couple of days I wasn't so much breathing as exhaling a defensive chemical weapon. My work colleagues, unsurprisingly, were absolutely delighted when Friday lunchtime arrived and I finally disappeared from the building.
Forty-three hours had been ticked off for the week, the coffers were a few pennies heavier and I decided that enough was enough. I needed to go fishing, even if it was only for a couple of hours and even if the weather looked like it was considering throwing every possible variety of autumn at me simultaneously. So, on the way home, I decided to detour down to the Warwickshire Avon for a spot of trotting.
The swim I had in mind was one where you need to don the waders, which is always a good start when you're already slightly tired and the temperature has dropped sufficiently to make you question your life choices.
Float peddler Dave Harrell had been down there not long previously and had apparently bagged up on chub and even managed a barbel trotting, which naturally made the whole thing sound considerably easier than it probably was.
If Dave can do it, I thought, then surely I can too, although history has repeatedly demonstrated that this particular line of reasoning is deeply flawed.
I'd fished the stretch since Dave's visit and had previously enjoyed some success catching chub off the top on bread. Unfortunately, the warmer conditions seemed to have encouraged the bigger chub that had been sitting in the oxygenated water to relocate themselves to somewhere considerably more convenient for them and considerably less convenient for me.
Still, I'd come this far and wasn't going home without at least having a poke around.
The weather wasn't exactly helping matters either, with a fairly strong wind blowing across the river and making the business of trotting a float look more like an exercise in remote-control boat operation. Despite wearing jeans underneath neoprene waders, after about two hours I was beginning to feel the cold creeping in. It was the sort of cold where you start telling yourself that you're perfectly comfortable while simultaneously wondering whether your feet can still actually feel anything.
The tactics were wonderfully simple, which is generally my preferred approach because the fewer things there are to go wrong, the fewer things I can subsequently blame. Six-millimetre mixed-colour pellets were loose-fed into the swim and a banded six-millimetre pellet was attached to a size 16 hook, which was about as complicated as the operation got. No twelve-page rig diagrams, no obscure Japanese hook pattern and no bait that costs more per kilo than the average family spends on groceries.
I fed the swim for about twenty minutes before making the first trot, mainly because I'd decided that the fish deserved a decent opportunity to arrive before I started disturbing them. The float went under and a small chublet was attached almost immediately, which was rather encouraging and also made me wonder whether I'd really needed to spend twenty minutes feeding the swim in the first place. Still, anglers are creatures of habit, and if you've spent twenty minutes throwing pellets into a river you feel obliged to pretend there was a carefully considered reason for doing it.
The next cast produced another bite, although this time the result was rather less satisfactory. The float disappeared, the fish shot off to the right with considerably more enthusiasm than the previous occupant and the hook promptly pulled just before it reached the safety of the reeds. Damn it, I thought, because that had probably been a decent chub and I'd managed to do the angling equivalent of dropping the winning lottery ticket down a drain.
Throughout the session it became increasingly obvious that the bigger chub simply weren't there, or if they were there they'd collectively decided to ignore me. The smaller chublets, however, were more than happy to keep me entertained and provided plenty of action, which is one of the reasons I enjoy trotting so much. You can spend hours chasing a particular fish and then suddenly realise that the smaller ones have actually provided most of the fun.
Then, completely unexpectedly, the float buried again towards the end of the run. The resulting fight didn't feel quite the same as the chub, and after a few moments it became apparent that I'd connected with something considerably more interesting than another small chub. It was a tiny baby barbel.
Now, I genuinely wasn't expecting that, and for a moment I just stood there with the sort of grin normally associated with somebody who has just discovered they've won something they didn't even enter. The little barbel had gate-crashed the chub party completely uninvited, but I couldn't have been happier to see it. Sometimes fishing has a funny way of giving you precisely what you didn't realise you were hoping for.
The significance of that little fish wasn't lost on me either, because this is one of the stretches affected by the severe fish kill back in June 2023. Thousands of dead fish, including mature chub, barbel and pike, were discovered along stretches of the Warwickshire Avon around Warwick and Barford, with angling subsequently suspended while the situation was investigated. The Environment Agency attributed the disaster primarily to low oxygen levels following sudden heavy summer storms washing accumulated road and gully pollutants into an already warm river, while local anglers raised other concerns including untreated sewage foam and pollution.
Whatever the precise combination of circumstances, the result was the same, and seeing so many dead fish was something that nobody who witnessed it is likely to forget. Rivers don't simply bounce back overnight from something like that, particularly when you're talking about mature fish that have taken years to reach any worthwhile size. Every surviving fish therefore seems a little bit more important, and every young fish feels like a tiny sign that the river is quietly getting on with the job of rebuilding itself.
I've caught barbel on this stretch during the previous season and have already had some this season as well, which has been hugely encouraging. But catching this particular little fish was different because it was so obviously young, and that made me wonder what the river might look like several years down the line if everything continues moving in the right direction. Perhaps that little fish will one day become one of those big, powerful Avon barbel that has some poor bloke standing in the reeds wondering why his rod has suddenly turned into a banana.
For me, that was the real highlight of the session. I hadn't caught anything big, I hadn't bagged up and I certainly hadn't achieved anything that would make the angling press sit up and take notice, but none of that mattered. Sometimes a fish doesn't have to weigh ten pounds to make an impression, and this one certainly did.
I sat there looking at the little barbel and couldn't help but smile. It was only a tiny fish, but given the history of the stretch it felt like a rather significant little fish, and one that I suspect I'll remember for a very long time. There was something rather special about seeing one of the next generation swimming around in a river that had been through such a terrible episode.
Eventually I packed away, climbed out of the waders and headed home feeling considerably happier than I had arrived. I'd been cold, I'd lost a decent chub, I'd caught a collection of chublets and I'd spent a couple of hours standing in a windy river wearing neoprene trousers like some sort of aquatic sausage. Yet somehow, that tiny barbel had made the whole thing worthwhile.
Fishing is funny like that. You can spend an entire season obsessing over big fish, looking at weather charts, river levels, moon phases and every other piece of information you can possibly find, only for the most memorable fish of the week to be something you could probably have carried home in a particularly enthusiastic cupped hand. It isn't always about what you catch, and occasionally the smallest fish can leave the biggest impression.
So, autumn is here, the temperatures are dropping and the rivers are beginning to look like proper fishing rivers again. The garlic has hopefully now vacated my pores, my colleagues have probably recovered sufficiently to return to work without fear and the diary makers have been warned that there are limits to how much of my life they are allowed to fill. Most importantly though, somewhere in the Warwickshire Avon there is now a tiny barbel swimming around, and for this angler, that was the icing on the cake.
Talking of Barbel, a link to Gale Lights podcast..
Great to see little barbel.
ReplyDeleteThat podcast is magnificent 😆