Fishing, I’ve decided, is essentially a long-running experiment in optimism versus common sense. Last Friday was a fine example of this delicate balance. The Warwickshire Avon had been rising steadily all week, carrying just enough pace and colour to get the imagination working overtime. In my head, hefty chub or barbel (potentially) were queuing up behind every crease, nudging each other out of the way to get at my hookbait.
I seized a late afternoon opportunity with all the enthusiasm of a man who had already pictured the trophy shot. The rods were in the boot, bait prepped, waterproofs reluctantly packed. I even made it to the club car park, which is normally the point of no return.
Unfortunately, stepping out of the car revealed two degrees of icy reality and rain that felt personally vindictive. The river was charging through like it had somewhere urgent to be, and I quickly concluded that bravery is overrated. The pub, on the other hand with the Wife, was warm and serving decent ale.
By Saturday morning the rivers had risen to such an extent that Noah was probably pricing up timber. There was nowhere remotely fishable unless I fancied freelining from a tree branch.
Typical then that the weather improved, just to rub it in. So I opted for a lie-in, followed by a family excursion to witness the legendary Flying Scotsman steaming through Henley-in-Arden. The kids had never seen it, and I took it upon myself to deliver a full historical briefing, complete with dramatic hand gestures and references to 100 mph heroics.
We positioned ourselves strategically, which is to say within comfortable range of the station pub. Three pints later, anticipation was high. A distant plume of steam appeared and the unmistakable rhythm of a steam locomotive grew louder.
This was it British engineering glory in motion. And then it thundered past at speed… towing backwards 🙈. We barely had time to register its existence before it vanished down the line like an embarrassed celebrity avoiding eye contact. Sam looked up at me and asked, “Is that it?” I had no satisfactory answer.
Sunday dissolved into rain and mild regret. I toyed with the idea of attacking the canal for a zander, just to salvage some angling credibility, but the sofa mounted a persuasive counterattack involving wine, and films.
It was relaxing, certainly, but there’s always that underlying guilt when you suspect the fish might be feeding while you’re horizontal. Anglers are cursed with this peculiar paranoia. The evening meant a good wine, good rum, a movie and a roaring fire, a time to chill in other ways.
No Sunday roast dinner this time (rare), as the night’s culinary virtue signalling began, as it so often does, with the noble intention of “eating well” and ended in a skillet of Pad kaphrao featuring pork belly so crisp it could’ve applied for planning permission, crowned with an egg fried to the structural integrity of a Victorian mill roof arteries aghast, tastebuds euphoric.
One tells oneself this is balance, especially with a forthcoming Glasgow sabbatical looming Sunday into Monday: a wholesome pilgrimage of food, drink, and the sort of enthusiastic excess that requires an elasticated waistband and plausible deniability.
There will be “just a couple” of pints, no doubt escalating into a symposium on fermentation via the Bon Accord and the Inn Deep, before tinnitus with Deep Dish at famous Sub Club reminds my knees that they are no longer undergraduate. Still, one must nourish the soul as well as the cholesterol count; life is short, the pork is crispy, and repentance like the dancefloor will be over far quicker than it began.
Anyway enough of that, this week, however, the Avon began dropping nicely. Not raging, not unfishable just that lovely steady fall that suggests things might be happening beneath the surface. I managed to carve out an hour and a half after work and headed for the Secret Swim, the one where bites are almost suspiciously reliable. Simple tactics were deployed: small lead, large piece of flake sprayed with garlic oil and underarm cast in to the coloured water, minimal fuss. It’s a swim that rewards confidence and punishes overthinking.
Last time out it had produced a 4lb 10oz chub that fought like it owned the postcode. Naturally, I wondered if something larger had moved in during the floods. The first cast settled perfectly into the slack and within minutes the rod tip gave that firm, purposeful nod that every chub angler recognises. No dithering, no tapping, then just a proper pull round that nearly took the rod in !!.
An unmissable bite !!!, that obviously I missed 😆
Still 10 minutes later I had a second chance !!, this time the strike met solid resistance. The fish bored downstream towards the snag with steady authority, not frantic but powerful, head thumping away as if mildly offended by the interruption. Then a broad bronze flank rolled in the current, a fish a fish !!
Not monstrous, not record-breaking, a 3lber or so. But a proper Avon chub, all muscle and disdain. In that instant, the sodden Friday, the flooded rivers, and the backwards steam locomotive were completely forgiven. Fishing has a habit of doing that hours of inconvenience rewarded by a single, satisfying moment.
The forecast now hints at a positively tropical fourteen degrees. next week, however a cold morning may have nipped the fingers, but the promise of milder air has the barbel anglers twitching. It’s not quite shorts-and-T-shirt weather, but it’s enough to stir hope again. I’ll be watching the levels closely, pretending to exercise restraint.
Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that next time — just maybe — it’ll be bigger.
Well, with the rivers looking less like rivers and more like mobile sections of the North Atlantic that had accidentally taken a wrong turn at Gloucester, fishing had, in the most British understatement possible, been “curtailed somewhat,” which is to say that every stretch of water within sensible driving distance was either the colour of builder’s tea or attempting to annex the nearest towpath, and so when Friday arrived work concluding mercifully at midday like a benevolent headmaster ringing the last bell before summer I found myself faced with that most dangerous of propositions: opportunity.
The sensible angler inside me, the one who owns far too many rods for a man with only two hands and a slightly unreliable left knee, suggested a speculative wander down the canal for a zander or two, because canals at least have the decency not to rise three feet in an afternoon; but the Avon, swelling faster than my blood pressure when subjected to the six o’clock news and its parade of doom, gloom and men pointing at graphs, was doing its level best to resemble a liquid freight train, and in truth I simply wasn’t feeling it.
There are days when the piscatorial muse whispers sweet nothings about chub beneath far-bank willows, and then there are days when she shrugs, orders takeaway and tells you to put your feet up, and so it was that I, alone in the house and answerable to no one but the kettle, drew the curtains with theatrical finality, powered up the surround sound system I had installed in a fit of technological optimism back in 2008, and committed myself to cinema rather than cyprinids.
The film in question Sinners, as recommended by my twin brother, who shares both my face, my questionable judgement and well worn liver turned out to be an unexpectedly rich slice of Mississippi-set supernatural mayhem, all juke joints, gangsters and things that go bump in the Delta night, and I must confess it was rather splendid.
The sort of movie that grips you by the lapels and refuses to let go, much like an irate bailiff or a particularly committed barbel; indeed I’d go so far as to say it was one of my favourites in a good long while, and as the bass rumbled through speakers that had previously known only the Shipping Forecast and the occasional overenthusiastic weather bulletin, I felt entirely vindicated in my decision to swap waders for popcorn.
Outside, of course, the meteorological farce continued unabated, low-pressure systems queuing over the UK as though waiting for discounted pasties, all because a stubborn slab of high pressure had parked itself over Scandinavia like a Volvo abandoned outside a fjord, blocking the usual eastward progress of weather fronts and ensuring that we, down here, received day after day of mizzle, drizzle and full-fat deluge, the rivers remaining emphatically knackered and in no mood to entertain a man with a landing net and misplaced optimism.
And yet, as every angler knows, the soul requires variety, and so it was that Liverpool beckoned, specifically the WAV Garden, where for a solid twelve hours twelve, dear reader, which is roughly the gestation period of a small mammal I found myself enthusiastically rearranging my limbs to the sounds of progressive house DJs, Sasha headlining with the sort of authority normally reserved for monarchs and particularly confident carp, the bass so insistent that one could have navigated to the venue blindfolded, guided solely by the rather large seismic wobble in one’s sternum.
The covered ground level did its noble best to muffle proceedings for the sake of civic harmony, but even so you could feel it half a mile away, a subterranean heartbeat pulsing through the city, and when proceedings shifted downstairs (Steve Parry one of favourites was playing) into the dark and dingy tunnel club mercifully before the neighbours could marshal their complaints, I was granted a tour of the labyrinthine interior from a well known fella and DJ (Thanks Paul), a temple to rhythm that left me grinning like a newcomer to raving who’d just been transported to a rave in the 1990's.
It is, I find, a remarkable tonic, this occasional surrender to music and motion; at 53 years of age, when society gently suggests you take up beige hobbies and begin sentences with “back in my day,” there is something gloriously defiant about dancing until the early hours, and the wellbeing boost it provides is not unlike that first savage pull on a rod tip when a fish decides your offering is irresistible proof that one is still, in fact, alive and kicking as is the tinnitus STILL !!
Fishing hovered at the back of my mind throughout, of course it did, because once afflicted we are never truly cured, but I did not miss it that weekend; the rivers would continue their impression of liquid chaos regardless of my presence, and sometimes absence sharpens the appetite better than any groundbait.
Thus it was that a midweek work-from-home day presented itself like a conspiratorial wink from the universe, and I seized the chance for a quick smash-and-grab on the Warwickshire Avon, which, though still high and carrying more debris than a teenager’s bedroom floor, had at least ceased its attempt to relocate entirely to the Midlands.
With perhaps two viable swims and less than an hour to deploy my dubious cunning and one my slightly off the beaten secret swim, I approached the task with the efficiency of a burglar on a tight schedule, rod assembled in record time, bait introduced with minimal ceremony, every sense tuned to the possibility of a chub lurking behind some crease in the slack water, smug and silver and entirely unaware that a middle-aged man with damp boots and renewed optimism had come calling.
Whether I caught or blanked is almost beside the point, for in truth the joy lay in the opportunism, the snatched hour between spreadsheets and responsibilities, the quiet rebellion of stepping down a muddy bank while colleagues elsewhere refreshed inboxes.
As I stood there watching the swollen river slide past with deceptive calm, I reflected that life, like angling, is rarely about perfect conditions; it is about choosing your moments, embracing the distractions be they horror films or hedonistic dance floors and returning, when the mood and the river both allow, to the water’s edge with just enough hope to make it interesting.
Anyway, dear readers, there I was hotfooting it like a ferret that’s just remembered it left the gas on towards what I optimistically refer to as the “big slack swim.” Now when I say “big,” I mean in spirit rather than in actual cubic footage of fishable water, because upon arrival I was greeted by a river so full it looked like it had eaten Christmas twice and was contemplating the cheeseboard.
The water was barely contained within its banks, sulking and bulging like a badly packed sleeping bag, and I quickly realised I’d have to fish it in about a foot of water. A foot. I’ve seen deeper puddles in supermarket car parks.
Still, never one to be defeated by mere hydrological excess, I plopped in a few hopeful nuggets of cheesepaste little yellow parcels of optimism and stood there like a man who has just posted a letter to himself. Nothing. Not a tremor. Not a flicker. The river gave me the cold shoulder. So, with the sort of dignity only an angler can muster when retreating from a terrible decision, I once again set my feet to “brisk embarrassment” mode and hoofed it off to what I call the Secret Swim.
Now, I shall not reveal the location of the Secret Swim. Not because I fear hordes of anglers descending upon it with bivvies the size of small retail parks, but because if I told you it wouldn’t be secret anymore and I’d have to rename it something awkward like “Formerly Secret Swim (Now Ruined).” Let’s just say it doesn’t get fished much. Possibly because it requires a short scramble, a duck under a hawthorn bush, and the sort of commitment usually reserved for assembling Scandinavian furniture.
But oh, what a sight greeted me. The swim looked perfect. You know the large slack away from the main flow that whispers “chub” in hushed, fishy tones, a couple of inviting snags that say, “Go on then, if you’re brave.” The light was beginning to soften into that golden half-hour before dusk when everything looks like it’s been filtered through a nostalgic biscuit tin.
I hurriedly set up, flicked the large bread flake this time into position, and settled in for what I assumed would be a pleasant, fishless contemplation of life.
Ten minutes later, I was staring at my landing net in mild disbelief.
Two chub. Not just any chub. Two proper, respectable, broad-shouldered river residents, both four-pounders, with the larger tipping the scales at 4lb 10oz. Four-ten! That’s not a chub, that’s a statement.
The bigger one fought like it had something to prove charging for every snag in the postcode, rod bent properly double, my heart performing percussion in my chest like an overenthusiastic drummer at a village fete. At one point I’m fairly certain the fish looked back at me as if to say, “You’ll have to do better than that, sunshine.”
Eventually, after a brief but spirited disagreement about ownership of the river, I coaxed it into the net. A beautiful fish. Bronze flanks glowing in the evening light, fins pristine, attitude exemplary. The sort of chub that makes you forgive every blank, every tangled rig, every time you’ve accidentally trodden in something unidentifiable and moist.
Naturally, I decided to stick it out. Because when you’ve had two fish in ten minutes, common sense says, “Strike while the iron is hot.” Unfortunately, angling common sense is more of a polite suggestion than an enforceable rule. The swim, having delivered its generosity, promptly shut up shop. I sat there, rod poised, watching the sun melt into the horizon like a pat of butter on hot toast. No more bites. Not even a twitch. The river had gone back to being a picture postcard with delusions of grandeur.
Still, I couldn’t complain. It had been what I like to call a “smash and grab” session—no marathon endurance test, no midnight philosophical crisis, just a quick raid, a brace of quality fish, and home in time to recount it all with unnecessary embellishment. These are the sessions that keep you coming back. Short, sharp, and just chaotic enough to make you feel like you’ve achieved something vaguely heroic.
And the conditions? Mild as you like. Water temperature at 9.1 degrees—practically tropical by winter river standards. The ground’s been soaking up that gentle rain like a sponge in a washing-up advert, then quietly releasing it back into the river, which explains why the levels were climbing faster than my optimism after the first bite. It all felt alive. Moving. Promising.
So yes, a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Two cracking chub, a sunset worth bottling, and only minimal sprinting between swims. I really must do more of these opportunistic little raids. There’s something wonderfully mischievous about slipping down to a barely fished corner of river, whispering a bit of cheesepaste and bread into the current, and nicking a couple of its finest residents before they realise what’s happened.
Until next time, keep your hooks sharp, your secrets secret, and your feet ready for rapid deployment. The river waits for no one especially not a man standing ankle-deep in a foot of water wondering where all the fish have gone.
Dry January is now safely in the rear-view mirror, crushed beneath the mud-terrain tyres of February, and I emerge blinking into the daylight with the faint realisation that sobriety, while technically survivable, is not something I would ever choose recreationally.
Still, it must be said, it passed with suspicious ease. No white-knuckle cravings, no midnight bargaining with myself in the kitchen, just the quiet satisfaction of knowing that I am, above all else, a stubborn old git. Dry January for me is not wellness; it is resistance training. A ritualistic breaking of the festive feedback loop where Christmas becomes a month-long pub crawl lubricated by mince pies and poor decisions.
Naturally, the Wife did not share my monk-like resolve and required taxi services on a couple of occasions. I provided these with magnanimity, smugness, and the faint moral superiority of a man clutching a bottle of sparkling water while surrounded by slurred karaoke. Willpower, it turns out, is hereditary, and sadly she married into the wrong bloodline. LOL, as the youths say, though they say it without irony and usually while being deeply disappointing.
With the calendar flicked over and the seal broken, it was only right to reacquaint myself with the pub, where a couple of pints of 6.6% Exmoor Beast’s awaited a beer that tastes like it was brewed by someone who hates you personally.
A proper pint and less than 3 quid in spoons. The kind that doesn’t so much refresh as challenge. This was merely a prelude, however, because Sundays in this house are less “day of rest” and more “low-level endurance event”.
By sunrise I was vertical, and from that moment until six in the evening I did not sit down once. There was fishing to do, errands to run, a pub to attend, football to half-watch, and a Sunday roast to cook for six people which in reality means twelve opinions and zero help.
Sam’s mate Matthew was present, along with his mother, who had been visiting friends the night before and had somehow wandered into this culinary hostage situation. She looked vaguely alarmed but game, like someone who’d accidentally joined a cult but liked the biscuits.
Before all that domestic theatre, though, there was the river. The Warwickshire Avon a river which, of late, has been performing like a pub band that peaked in 1994. Still there, still capable, but mostly going through the motions. I had hopes for chub, real hopes, the kind that make you ignore recent evidence and tie rigs anyway.
The track down to the syndicate stretch was waterlogged, though I didn’t give it much thought until I was already committed. This is where the Jimny comes into its own.
Narrow all-terrain tyres, selectable four-wheel drive, low ratio if things get biblical, and weighing approximately the same as a family-sized box of cornflakes, it simply doesn’t care. It revels in adversity. Mud? Puddles? Ruts deep enough to lose a Labrador? Excellent. It scampered through like a mountain goat with a mortgage.
At the top of the stretch I parked, mashed some bread like a medieval peasant, and walked the bank depositing freebies into every slack, crease, and fish-shaped suspicion I could find. The river was still high and coloured oddly not the reassuring brown of honest rain, but that unsettling hue that suggests paperwork and a corporate apology are imminent.
Then came the foam. Suspicious foam. The sort of foam that doesn’t belong in nature unless something has gone very wrong. No doubt a gift from Severn Trent, who recently hiked my water bill to such a degree that I briefly considered whether the neighbour behind me had been siphoning off my supply to top up a duck pond under cover of darkness.
We are apparently “heavy users”, which sounds less like a billing category and more like a support group. Dishwasher daily, washing machine constantly, two teenage boys who emit smells previously unknown to science —yes, fine, but £100 a month? Jesus wept. Infrastructure investment, they say. Shareholder dividends, they mean.
This stretch doesn’t see much bait, and the chub, when present, are usually a better-than-average stamp. What I didn’t expect was that after five swims without so much as a tremor, the first fish would be… well… disappointing. Not a monster. Not even pretending. A chub that looked like it had been printed on reduced-quality paper. Another followed, same size, as if they were being issued in pairs.
So, plan B. Or rather, plan Z the last-gasp, most awkward, most swear-inducing swim on the stretch. A snag-ridden horror show where fish go to test your mental resilience. I’d caught chub here before, so I switched to cheesepaste, reasoning that if nothing else, it smells like regret and ambition.
Ten minutes in, a couple of plucks on the one-ounce quiver tip. Then it went properly round, pulling left with intent, and I struck… immediately clouting the large branch to my right like a man fencing an invisible opponent.
The fish, meanwhile, made a determined bid for the roots on the left. What followed was less “playing a fish” and more “hostage negotiation with violence”. I bullied it, unapologetically, because snag fishing is not the time for politeness.
Eventually it rolled, popped its head up, and slid into the net with all the grace of a defeated tyrant. I thought it might scrape four pounds, but it didn’t quite. Still, a proper chub. A fish with shoulders. A satisfying full stop to the session.
Then it was back to civilisation. Pub visit with the rabble. Errands. Home. Apron on. Dave Seaman on the speakers one of my all-time favourites, a man whose sets have soundtracked more questionable life choices than I care to admit.
Seladoria parties, Seaman and Steve Parry, conversations that wandered everywhere and nowhere. Three hours and forty minutes of exactly my kind of beats, football murmuring in the background, roast aromas filling the house.
By the time I finally sat down, plate in hand, pint poured, the day felt perfectly complete. Fishing, family, food, music, mild outrage at utility companies all the essential food groups.
By Saturday morning the rivers had risen to such an extent that Noah was probably pricing up timber. There was nowhere remotely fishable unless I fancied freelining from a tree branch. 
One tells oneself this is balance, especially with a forthcoming Glasgow sabbatical looming Sunday into Monday: a wholesome pilgrimage of food, drink, and the sort of enthusiastic excess that requires an elasticated waistband and plausible deniability.
