Warwickshire Avon - Row-Royce's and Roentgenography

The padlocked security gate was open, which immediately meant that the other locked security gate would probably be open too, and as it turned out, I was right. There is something deeply satisfying about correctly predicting the behaviour of gates, although sadly this particular skill has yet to prove useful in any other area of my life.

The only slight drawback was that the boat club were also out in force, milling up and down the river with the enthusiasm of people who had absolutely no appreciation of the fact that I had come specifically to catch fish. They even had a little boat with an outboard motor, which produced a racket normally associated with an angry lawnmower being thrown into a washing machine.

It also had the unfortunate habit of disturbing the water, which isn't particularly helpful when you're trying to persuade a suspicious predatory fish that your lure is actually a small, delicious and completely unsuspecting meal. On the other hand, there were a couple of boats full of women in vest tops and Lycra, so frankly, sometimes you have to accept a little turbulence in the pursuit of angling.

There are plenty of things to moan about in this world, after all. Fuel prices, for example, are enough to make you consider taking up pigeon racing instead, but watching a boat full of women glide past while you're lure fishing in a nice environment isn't really one of them.

There were already a couple of other anglers on the stretch, lure fishing in much the same way as Sam and I intended to. The Warwickshire Avon really could do with a decent drop of rain, though, as the level was low and the water was ridiculously clear, the sort of clear where you can see a fish looking at your lure, reading the small print and then deciding it doesn't fancy signing the contract.

A bit of colour would have been very welcome. The Warwickshire Stour, meanwhile, apparently had enough duckweed to start its own gardening centre and desperately needed clearing out, which just goes to show that rivers, like people, are rarely happy with what they've got.

There is plenty of depth on this particular stretch, though, and over the years I've had some lovely Zander and Pike from it, both on deadbaits and lures. So there was every reason to think that one of the resident toothy residents might fancy getting involved.

I left Sam to his own devices in a couple of swims while I retreated to the back of the Jimny to perform the most important part of any fishing trip: breakfast. The air fryer was deployed, bacon and sausages were loaded in, and for once there wasn't a gas stove rattling around in the back of the vehicle. Oh and I  removed a can and a lid dumped there by an another angler, you do wonder. 

Instead, I had a Jackery Lithium Iron Phosphate battery pack capable of supplying 1500 watts without breaking into a sweat. It is remarkable how far modern technology has come, because once upon a time the height of sophistication was being able to boil a kettle without setting fire to your trousers.

As the bacon and sausages were cooking, I wandered back to see how Sam was getting on. This was where things suddenly became interesting, because a small Pike came shooting out of the depths and absolutely nailed the Temu Pike lure.

It splashed about like a fish that had just realised it had made a terrible life choice, and for a few glorious seconds it looked as though breakfast might be accompanied by a photograph of Sam holding a Pike. Sadly, the hooks came free and the Pike disappeared back into the Avon with what I imagine was a fairly comprehensive list of swear words.

Sam was gutted, and I was gutted for him. There is something particularly cruel about seeing a Pike, watching it hit the lure, fighting it, and then watching the entire thing disappear before you can even begin wondering where you're going to put the fish for a photograph.

Still, there was plenty of water to explore, so after breakfast we got mobile. We moved from peg to peg, changing lures from time to time and throwing them into the drink whenever the rowing boats allowed us the privilege.

Unfortunately, there seemed to be a rowing boat passing every five or ten minutes, and eventually the whole thing started to resemble a particularly badly organised game of Frogger. We'd cast out, retrieve, look upstream, see another boat approaching, sigh, and wait for humanity to finish using the river.

 Between us we covered six or seven swims each, giving them a decent amount of attention and trying various lures. The Pike and Zander, however, appeared to have held a meeting beforehand and unanimously agreed that today was going to be a day off.

Eventually we returned to the car, packed things away and headed downstream towards the weir. Thankfully the weir was free of other anglers, so we gave that a good go, working the likely areas and hoping that something with teeth had decided to turn up for the afternoon shift.

Nothing did. Not even the usual tentative tap that makes you think you've hooked a shopping trolley, a branch or possibly the submerged remains of a small Victorian railway.

We then headed towards the deadarm, which is normally one of my default areas for Pike and Zander on the Avon. In higher water it becomes a lovely area of slack water, somewhere predators can sit out of the flow and wait for something unfortunate to drift past.

I'd never seen it as clear as it was today. Honestly, it looked like an aquarium, except this aquarium had absolutely no intention of displaying any fish whatsoever.

We gave the margins, cover and likely ambush points a good twenty minutes or so, putting lures through all the places where I'd normally expect something to happen. Nothing happened.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was pretty much the story of the day. The Pike were apparently on strike, the Zander had booked annual leave, and the Avon had decided to provide us with a lovely scenic walking experience instead.

Interestingly, we weren't the only ones suffering. I got chatting to a couple of Ukrainian lads who were also fishing, and they were blanking too, which was strangely comforting.

There's something reassuring about a blank when you discover that the river isn't personally ignoring you. If several anglers are standing around catching nothing, you can at least blame the river rather than your lure selection, your retrieve, your technique, your breakfast, the phase of the moon or that suspiciously shaped twig you spent twenty minutes casting at.

So, despite the lack of fish, it was still a cracking day out with Sam. Plenty of steps were covered, plenty of water was explored, breakfast was consumed, and we managed to spend some quality Father-and-Son time together, which is considerably more important than whether a Pike decides to eat a bit of plastic.

I'll be heading out again later, probably into the dark after a Sunday roast. This is the last weekend of my month of abstinence, and I have to admit the last few Sundays have been very different.

I've actually missed the usual Sunday routine, wine and a slap up roast. A month has gone considerably quicker than I expected, and before long normal Sunday service will presumably resume, which means fishing, questionable decisions, cold feet, ridiculous amounts of tackle and wondering why I haven't simply stayed at home in front of the television.

But that's fishing, isn't it? You can spend a small fortune on rods, reels, lures, batteries, vehicles and equipment capable of powering an air fryer, drive miles to a beautiful river, walk several thousand steps and spend hours casting into what looks like an enormous swimming pool.

And at the end of it, the only fish you see is a small Pike that escapes.

Still, there was bacon. There were sausages. There were boats full of women in Lycra.

Some days, you have to recognise a successful fishing trip when you see one.

Warwickshire Avon - The Untrodden Pt.57

When chaos engine Donald Trump met elected by his mates to lead the country Andy Burnham at the United Nations, social media naturally did what media does best and immediately turned a perfectly ordinary diplomatic encounter into a forensic examination of two men standing approximately three feet apart. Burnham, with his wonky glasses, slightly rigid posture and expression suggesting that somebody had just whispered "we need a word" in his ear, was soon being compared to Ronnie Corbett halfway through a particularly uncomfortable monologue, which seemed a little harsh until you looked at the photograph again.

There was something about the whole thing that reminded me of fishing the Warwickshire Avon when it is gin-clear, because that is precisely how you feel when you are stood on the bank and every fish in the river knows you are there. 

You do not simply feel like you are fishing; you feel like you have been invited onto a television quiz show where the fish are the audience, the presenter is a particularly judgmental chub and every movement you make is being marked out of ten.

The difference, of course, is that Andy Burnham probably had advisers, security men and assorted United Nations types around him, whereas I had a tub of mashed bread, a quiver tip and a cormorant that looked like it was waiting for me to make a mistake. 

I suspect Burnham's advisers were marginally more useful, although whether any of them could have located a chub in gin-clear water is another matter entirely.

The reason I found myself on the Avon in the first place was largely because my fishing partner has recently rediscovered his enthusiasm for fishing, although calling him my fishing partner at the moment is perhaps being slightly optimistic. 

Sam has been going fishing with me since he was four years old and has now reached that rather annoying stage where he is actually becoming quite good at it.

He likes nothing more than stalking chub off the top, fishing a float for whatever happens to be swimming about, or chucking a lure around for predators, which seems to be his current obsession. I suspect this is partly because quite a few of the youngsters his age are currently indoors shouting at people they have never met while playing computer games, whereas Sam is outside shouting at fish he has never met, which seems considerably healthier.

Although, to be fair, fish do not usually respond by telling him that his mum is something unrepeatable. They tend to just swim away, which makes them considerably more civilised than some of the people he could be talking to online.

I can fish for several hours, carefully select a swim, contemplate the hydrology, assess the light levels, consider the wind direction, choose the perfect bait, make three hundred casts and return home with a damp sleeve, while Sam and his mates chuck maggots into a canal and catch nine. At some point you have to question whether your carefully developed fishing philosophy is actually just a very elaborate way of not catching fish.

The problem is that Sam's renewed enthusiasm has resulted in me being somewhat demoted. Last weekend he was off fishing with some mates from school and this weekend he was off again, meaning that I appear to have gone from being chief fishing companion to something resembling an Uber driver with a landing net.

The previous report had been particularly galling because it had been delivered with the sort of casual indifference normally reserved for somebody telling you they had popped to the shops for some milk. "We caught nine," he announced, as though catching nine fish was something you simply did between breakfast and lunch.

Nine.

Still, I cannot really complain because at least he is out there fishing, and a couple of his mates apparently want to go but do not have anybody in their family who fishes. That is a difficult one when you are a youngster because unless an adult is prepared to take you, fishing is not exactly something you can simply decide to go and do.

So, after picking up some maggots from Martyn's, I dropped Sam off just outside Stratford-upon-Avon to meet Hugo, this time rather than Noah. I think there are a few of his mates who would like to get into fishing, but when there is nobody in the family who fishes it becomes surprisingly difficult for a youngster to get started.

Sam is competent enough to know what he is doing, which is slightly irritating because his Dad isn't always quite so sure. I have spent years teaching him how to fish and am now discovering that the most dangerous stage of parenthood is not when your child starts walking, talking or answering back, but when they realise that Dad occasionally has absolutely no idea what he is doing.

He had wanted a lie-in, naturally, so I did not drop him off until around 9.30am, which is not exactly an ideal time to be starting a serious summer fishing session. By then the sun was already doing its best to illuminate every pebble, weed stem and suspiciously positioned fish in the river.

Still, I decided to kill two birds with one stone, although given the number of birds involved later in the session I probably should have chosen a different expression. I would bait up the swim where I had caught the carp recently, ready for fishing on Sunday evening, and then spend a couple of hours roving around trying to winkle out a chub while getting some exercise.

I parked at the top of the stretch, grabbed some mashed bread and set off down the river. The plan was to prime seven or eight swims, put plenty of bait into the area I intended to fish the following evening, then return to the car, get the fishing tackle and see whether I could persuade a chub to make a catastrophic error.

The Avon was proper clear.

Not just clear, either; this was the sort of clear where you begin to wonder whether the Environment Agency has quietly drained half the water out during the night. You could practically see the fish thinking, and I am fairly sure one of the chub looked directly at me and then moved behind a piece of weed specifically so that I could not see it.

Now, trotting a stickfloat with maggot would probably have produced some bites because maggots are basically the fishing equivalent of ringing the dinner bell. But I fancied a decent chub, and there is something about bread fishing in clear water that appeals to the part of the angler's brain that apparently enjoys making life unnecessarily difficult.

I settled into the first swim with bread on the hook and, almost immediately, the quiver tip started moving. It was not the lovely, confident pull-round that suggests a decent chub has arrived for breakfast, but a frantic series of bangs and snatches from small fish that seemed to believe I had delivered a buffet specifically for them.

The tip was constantly on the move, literally every swim, with the bread apparently causing more excitement among the small fry than I had anticipated. It was less like presenting a bait to a wary chub and more like throwing a loaf of bread into a swimming pool full of toddlers.

Still, I persisted because that is what anglers do when the fish are small. We tell ourselves that the proper fish will be along in a minute, and then spend twenty minutes proving that it will not.

In the third swim I finally managed to connect with a chublet, so technically I had caught exactly what I had come for. Admittedly, I had been hoping for something around ten times the weight, but I have always believed that you should never look a gift fish in the mouth, particularly when it is small enough to disappear through your fingers.

At least it was not a blank, and that is an important distinction. A blank is a blank, whereas a couple of tiny chublets can be described as "a difficult session where I managed to nick a few fish", which sounds considerably more respectable when you are telling somebody about it later.

I moved on, continuing the old roving routine that I have always enjoyed. There is something wonderfully simple about carrying a small amount of tackle along a river, dropping into likely-looking swims and never quite knowing whether the next cast will produce a tiny chublet, a proper fish or absolutely nothing whatsoever.

The beauty of roving is that every new swim brings fresh optimism. Fresh optimism is one of the most important pieces of tackle an angler possesses because it weighs nothing, costs nothing and can be replenished simply by walking twenty yards downstream.

At one point I dropped the bread into another swim and within a few seconds something substantial appeared from the depths. For a moment I thought I had finally found the decent chub I was after, before a huge cormorant surfaced right in the middle of the swim. You forget just how big cormorants are until one suddenly appears a few feet away from you. Close up they are basically a scale model of a prehistoric bird that has somehow survived into the modern world purely to annoy anglers and eat the fish they have spent hours trying to catch.

It was enormous.

It was also completely unconcerned by my presence, which is the sort of confidence I admire in wildlife. I stood there holding a fishing rod while the cormorant stared back at me as if I was the one who had wandered into its swim uninvited.

We stared at each other for a while.

I am fairly certain I lost.

The cormorant eventually disappeared downstream, presumably to terrorise somebody else's swim, leaving me to wonder whether it had actually been there before I arrived or whether it had simply been summoned by the scent of mashed bread and angling incompetence. I suppose it could have been worse; at least it had not asked me for a share of the bait.

A buzzard had also been keeping me company throughout the session, circling overhead and occasionally calling from somewhere beyond the trees. It was a pleasant reminder that there was considerably more going on around me than my inability to catch a decent chub.

In fact, when you think about it, I was in a fairly precarious position in the food chain. The cormorant was below me, the buzzard was above me and the fish were somewhere in between, probably discussing the easiest way of making me look stupid.

I picked up another couple of chublets as I worked my way along, but nothing remotely approaching the sort of fish I had envisaged when I left the car. The conditions were always going to make it difficult, particularly with the sun getting higher, so I was not exactly surprised.

Still, it was enjoyable to be back to my roving roots. There is something about moving along a river rather than sitting in one swim for hours that keeps you grounded as a fisherman, especially when you have spent far too much time convincing yourself that you need another rod, another reel or another box of bits.

The truth is that I need less tackle.

Unfortunately, I already own the more.

The roving approach also provides an extremely useful psychological escape route when things do not go according to plan. You have not blanked, you see; you have "explored the stretch", which is a phrase that sounds much more impressive and has the added advantage of being almost impossible to disprove.

Eventually, after a couple of hours, I decided to call time. I had caught a few chublets, seen a cormorant the size of a small Labrador, been accompanied by a buzzard and walked enough of the riverbank to justify the breakfast I would inevitably eat when I got home.

It had been tough, as expected, but I had enjoyed it. Sometimes that is enough, although it is worth noting that I generally say that immediately after catching small fish and considerably less enthusiastically after blanking.

The really important part of the day, however, was what I had done before fishing. I had baited the swim where I had recently caught the carp, and that was where I intended to fish the following evening.

The swim is a big one, too, which means I might even take two rods.

I know.

It sounds reckless.

But there is a lot of water in front of me and, in theory, two rods should allow me to cover different areas. I have watched other anglers do it and they seem perfectly capable of keeping two rods under control, so how difficult can it actually be?

This is where experience and optimism occasionally collide.

I have fished two rods before, and the second rod has a remarkable tendency to transform itself from a fishing implement into a highly sophisticated device for creating problems. The moment both rods are out, both tips apparently decide that they require my attention at exactly the same time. Meanwhile, Sam and I will be doing some lure fishing in the morning at his request. Which means that once again I will be following somebody considerably younger than me around while he casts lures at things I probably would not have thought were worth casting at.

He is pretty good at it too.

Annoyingly good.

There was a time when I was the one showing him how to cast, how to hold a float, how to present a bait and how to stalk a chub. Now he is reaching the stage where he occasionally looks at me with the quiet expression of somebody who has realised that Dad does not actually know as much as Dad claims.

I am hoping he never fully works it out.

Although, judging by the number of fish he is catching with his mates, I suspect we are rapidly approaching that point. The pupil is beginning to become the master, and I am beginning to wonder whether I should have spent more time teaching him how to catch fish badly. Still, if the younger generation wants to go fishing, I am more than happy to take him. Even if I am increasingly being relegated to transport manager, bait supplier, net carrier, photographer and general provider of sandwiches.

It is all part of the service.

And frankly, if the alternative is him sitting indoors all day on a PlayStation shouting at somebody called XxDestroyerxX, I will happily drive him to the canal at half past nine on a Saturday morning. 

Even if he comes home and tells me they caught nine.

Especially if he comes home and tells me they caught nine.

Because that is what fishing is about, really. 

It is not always about catching the biggest fish or taking the photograph that will eventually be printed at enormous size and hung above the fireplace.

Sometimes it is about getting outside, walking a river, watching a buzzard, being surprised by a prehistoric-looking cormorant, catching a chublet the size of a large sardine and then going home wondering why you did not bring more bread. Sometimes it is simply about being there.

And occasionally it is about watching your son become a better angler than you are. Which is lovely, although I am not sure I am quite ready for the day when he starts telling me which swim I should fish.

Although, if he tells me where the fish are, I suppose I will listen.

After all, he caught nine last week and a small pike this week !!.

I caught three chublets.

So perhaps, on this occasion, the pupil really has become the master.

I am just hoping he does not ask me to start paying him for guiding.

Although, given the current price of maggots, I would not be remotely surprised.

Warwickshire Avon - Trotterology and Tranquillity

There are many things I enjoy about fishing, but trotting a float down a river sits somewhere near the very top of the list. I really do love it, and I'm not entirely sure whether that's because of the fishing itself or because it provides an excellent excuse to stand in a river for several hours ignoring the modern world. Either way, I'm perfectly happy with the arrangement. 

There are certainly worse ways to spend an afternoon having than standing next to, or in a river for that matter, staring at a tiny piece of plastic and pretending you've temporarily escaped the responsibilities of adulthood.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the quiver tip pulling round, the movement of an isotope in the darkness and that wonderful moment when a fish decides to have a disagreement with whatever lure you've just spent far too much money on. There is something wonderfully addictive about feeling that tug through your fingers or seeing a rod tip suddenly come alive, but when a float disappears beneath the surface and you strike into a solid fish, well, that's a different level of satisfaction altogether.

Perhaps it's because trotting requires you to concentrate completely on something that is of absolutely no importance to anyone else but has somehow become the most important thing in your life. The float is moving, the line needs controlling, the loosefeed needs to go in at precisely the right pace and somewhere underneath all that flowing water there might be a barbel deciding whether your little pellet looks sufficiently nutritious to risk eating. 

It's basically a high-stakes negotiation between a man, a piece of plastic and a fish with the brain capacity to eat a pellet and then immediately swim into a snag. Somehow, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I have convinced myself that I am the professional in this arrangement.

For those few hours, nothing else really matters. The emails can wait, the phone can remain in the pocket and whatever nonsense the modern world has decided is terribly important today can carry on without me, because I've got a piece of plastic floating downstream and I'm determined to make it disappear. That's the beauty of river fishing for me. 

You don't necessarily need to catch anything to feel that you've achieved something, although obviously catching something does improve the experience considerably and anyone who says otherwise is probably trying to convince themselves after a particularly barren season.

There is a strange sort of satisfaction in spending a few hours feeding pellets to fish you haven't seen, before going home hungry and telling your family you've had "a lovely afternoon." Try explaining that to someone who doesn't fish and you can actually watch their opinion of you changing in real time.

"What did you catch?" they ask, usually with the enthusiasm of someone expecting a perfectly reasonable answer. "Nothing," you reply, before explaining that you thoroughly enjoyed standing in a river for half the day achieving absolutely nothing measurable.

"Did you enjoy it?" they ask, still trying to find the positive. "Immensely," you say, because somehow that makes perfect sense to you and absolutely nobody else.

This particular Friday afternoon, after work, I fancied a reccy to a very quiet stretch that had once been home to my personal-best barbel. 

The river was clearer than tap water, which is both wonderful and slightly alarming because while clear water allows you to see what's going on, it also means the fish can see exactly what you're doing.

And what you're doing, unfortunately, is standing in the middle of their home dressed like a poorly equipped aquatic burglar. You might have convinced yourself that you're being stealthy, but from the fish's perspective you're basically a large, angling idiot waving a fishing rod around.

I spent some time baiting a few swims and peering into the depths, hoping to spot signs of fish. Clear water makes you do this, although it also encourages the angler's imagination to become completely detached from reality, so that every dark shape becomes a barbel until closer inspection reveals that it is actually a branch that has been lying there since the Jurassic period.

I've lost count of the number of times I've stared at a suspicious shadow for thirty seconds, heart rate increasing, convinced I've discovered a monster. Eventually I get closer, only to discover that the biggest fish in the river is actually a bit of wood. Still, I fancied my chances. I'd decided to trot a couple of swims with a banded 6mm pellet secured to a size 16 Guru MWG hook, loosefeeding the same mixed 6mm pellets into the flow and hoping to create what I like to think of as a conveyor belt of temptation.

The idea was that the fish would see the pellets arriving one after another, become increasingly excited, locate my hookbait and immediately make the sort of poor decision that keeps anglers in business. It was a flawless plan, apart from the fish, the river and the possibility that absolutely none of it would work.

I've caught barbel from the Wye up to around 9lb using this set-up, so there was a degree of confidence behind the idea. Confidence is a strange thing in fishing, though, because there is only a very thin line between confidence and delusion, and I've spent enough time staring at empty swims to know which side of that line I normally occupy.

The first few trots were uneventful. The float went down the river, I controlled the line, introduced a little loosefeed and repeated the process, gradually becoming convinced that this particular trot was going to produce a fish despite absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support that theory.

That's another wonderful thing about fishing. You can do exactly the same thing fifty times without success and still genuinely believe that the fifty-first attempt will be the one, because the next cast always feels different somehow.

Perhaps that's why anglers are such optimists, or perhaps we're simply very good at ignoring statistical evidence when there's a rod in our hand. Give a fisherman a rod, a float and a vaguely fish-shaped stretch of river and suddenly probability becomes nothing more than an inconvenient suggestion.

I'd originally been using the Drake domed float, but eventually decided to change over to a Drennan clear jobbie. It was still a fairly substantial float in the scheme of things, but being clear I convinced myself that it would be less obvious to any wary fish below, which sounded perfectly sensible at the time. 

Whether a chub or barbel actually looks upwards, sees a float and thinks, "Hang on, that's not quite right," is another matter entirely. I've never asked one, mainly because barbel are notoriously difficult interview subjects and tend to leave before you've got to the interesting questions.

"Excuse me, Mr Barbel, do you find the clear float less intrusive?" Splash. "And what are your thoughts on the 6mm pellet?" Gone, followed by several seconds of me staring into the water wondering whether I've just been ignored by a fish. Very poor media relations, really. You'd think a fish that spends its entire life underwater would be more accommodating when someone finally tries to interview it.

Still, the clear float went on and the process continued. Cast, trot, control, feed, watch, repeat; it's a remarkably simple process when you break it down, although somehow I manage to make it feel like a major expedition requiring approximately half the contents of my garage. At some point, I became so focused on the float that the rest of the world ceased to exist. We spend so much of our lives surrounded by things demanding our attention that fishing gives us permission to concentrate on something completely unnecessary and, in doing so, makes it feel incredibly important.

A float drifting down a river shouldn't really matter. A six-millimetre pellet shouldn't matter, a fish eating it shouldn't matter and certainly a bloke standing ankle-deep in a river on a Friday afternoon shouldn't matter to anyone else, but for those few moments it all matters enormously.

The float is approaching the crease, the line is just right and the loosefeed is ticking down the swim. The hookbait is travelling somewhere underneath it all and suddenly you convince yourself that this is it, despite having experienced exactly the same feeling approximately seventeen times already.

You watch and you wait, completely convinced that the next second is going to change everything. The float passes the likely spot, carries on downstream and provides you with yet another opportunity to reconsider your life choices.

Nothing happens, but you keep watching anyway because obviously the barbel might take approximately nine seconds after the float has vanished around the bend. This is perfectly logical behaviour if you're an angler and deeply concerning if you're anyone else.

Eventually you wind in and prepare for the next trot. There is no evidence that anything has changed, but somehow you're convinced that this one will be different because, well, you've put the float back in the water and that's apparently enough.

 And that's fishing. You don't need evidence; you need hope, preferably combined with a 13-foot float rod, a pocket full of pellets and an unhealthy willingness to repeat the same action until darkness makes the decision for you. 

Maybe that's why I love trotting so much. It's not simply about catching fish, although catching a barbel is obviously an excellent way of improving an afternoon and tends to make the journey home considerably more enjoyable.

It's about being completely present in that tiny piece of river and waiting for something to happen. Sometimes nothing does happen, and that's fine too, although I'd still prefer it if something around nine pounds happened to happen.

Sometimes the float disappears, the rod bends and the river suddenly contains the most important fish in the entire world. For a few seconds, everything else disappears and there is only you, the fish and the increasingly urgent realisation that you've got to land the bloody thing.

Other times you spend three hours feeding pellets to absolutely nothing and return home smelling faintly of river, standing water and disappointment. Both experiences, strangely enough, still count as fishing, although one makes a much better story.

And I'll happily take either. Although, if anyone asks, I'd obviously prefer the barbel.

Anyway, enough of the waffle, I started in the first swim that usually gives me a bit of encouragement, the sort of swim that practically points at you and says, “Go on then, you know you want to.” It looked absolutely textbook, with streamer weed, gravel on the bottom and enough cover to the left and right to make any sensible angler stop, unpack the tackle and immediately convince himself he was about to catch a bag of fish. Walking past it would have been ridiculous, so naturally I sat down and prepared myself for several hours of disappointment.

The first job was to feed a decent rain of pellets, partly to get the bigger fish away from the thick cover and partly because throwing bait into a river always makes you feel like something important is about to happen. I fed for a good twenty minutes and, eventually, when the fish started running down, I began to get the odd little dink on the float, which obviously meant a bite was imminent because that's how fishing works when you've read enough articles about it. Or so I thought, because what followed was trot after trot after trot with that float refusing to go anywhere other than downstream, which was beginning to feel quite personal.

I changed depths, altered the shotting, fished tight to the cover and generally poked that float into every likely-looking bit of water where a dace, chublet or something with an appetite might reasonably have been hiding. Nothing, not even a suicidal small fish that had somehow mistaken my maggot for the last meal on Earth. Way upstream from here, at exactly this time last week, it had been a bite a chuck, which made me wonder whether the fish had received a memo overnight informing them that I was coming and advising them all to stay indoors.

Perhaps matchman Shayne had been right after all when he said, “Mick, don't bother,” although naturally I had interpreted that as the sort of negative nonsense that only somebody who doesn't understand my enormous fishing potential would say. After an hour and a half I had become something of a master at trotting, in that I could now watch a float disappear downstream for several yards without experiencing even the slightest expectation that it might actually disappear under. The presentation was perfect, the float was behaving beautifully and the fish were presumably behind the cover laughing themselves silly at the idiot waving a rod about on the bank.

Eventually common sense, or what passes for it in my head, suggested that a move might be required because I didn't have an infinite amount of time and the river wasn't showing any signs of suddenly becoming embarrassed about the situation. I packed up and settled into another swim upstream, where there was a lovely run skirting some vegetation on the far bank and the float would pass beneath the canopy of a rather substantial tree. There was also some nice streamer weed and a gravel bottom, so once again the whole place looked like somebody had designed it specifically for an angler who was about to make a complete arse of himself.

I dropped some leftover groundbait and pellets into the margin and at least this time there was immediate evidence that the river contained actual fish rather than being an elaborate aquatic sculpture. Minnows appeared, then small roach and even a few decent gudgeon, all of them apparently delighted to demonstrate that they existed while simultaneously refusing to participate in my fishing. The water was painfully clear, but surely a steady trot with a few pellets going in little and often would eventually bring the better fish out to play, wouldn't it?

Well, yes, eventually there was a bite, and because I had spent so long staring at a motionless float I was completely unprepared for the possibility that it might actually do something. It buried properly and I struck into a solid fish, which immediately demonstrated that it had considerably more experience of this river than I did and headed straight for the reeds to my right. 

I tried everything short of climbing into the river after it, but the fish had clearly read the chapter entitled “How To Do An Angler Properly,” and disappeared into the vegetation with a final tug that translated quite neatly as, “Thanks for the pellets, mug.”

And that, rather unfortunately, was where the entertainment ended, because trot after trot after trot produced even less action than the first swim. I changed things around, adjusted the depth and tried different lines, but the float remained resolutely above water while I became increasingly convinced that every fish in the river had gathered just downstream specifically to watch me suffer. At one point I was beginning to suspect the minnows were communicating with the bigger fish, possibly by underwater WhatsApp, warning them that the bloke with the trotting rod was still there.

Eventually the curfew arrived and I packed everything away, walking back towards the car with the tail firmly between my legs and the sort of expression normally seen on somebody who has just been comprehensively outwitted by a vegetable. I hadn't exactly covered myself in glory, but then again, the river had given me a couple of hours of peace, fresh air and enough frustration to clear the mind completely, which is probably the entire point of the exercise anyway. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon than standing beside a river being ignored by fish, so I suppose I'll call it a result and get on with the important business of planning the next one.