Warwickshire Avon - Thermometrographs and Thanatophilia

Well, a week off the booze thus far after August's excesses and I must admit, I'm already sleeping better. Which is probably a good thing, although I'm beginning to wonder whether sleep itself is the problem, because my subconscious appears to have developed a taste for the frankly disturbing.

There's an old rumour that eating cheese before bed gives you wild dreams, and as somebody who occasionally likes to experiment with lucid dreaming, I thought I'd put this ancient dairy folklore to the test yet another time. Cheese contains tryptophan, which the brain uses in all sorts of clever ways involving serotonin, sleep and dreaming, although quite why my brain decided to interpret this as an invitation to produce something involving necrophilia (yes really 💤🙈) is a question I'll leave to considerably more qualified people.

The culprit, on this occasion, was a rather innocent-looking chunk of Bleu d'Auvergne. I went to bed expecting perhaps a vivid dream involving a tropical island, a large barbel and possibly Scarlett Johansson if the subconscious was feeling generous, but instead it served up something so profoundly wrong that even I woke up thinking, "Blimey, steady on."

I'm not easily shocked, as you may have gathered, but even I felt that Bleu d'Auvergne had crossed a line. So it's back to Stilton for me, because clearly the French cannot be trusted with the delicate workings of the English subconscious.

Perhaps I've simply trained my brain over the years, courtesy of Albert Hofmann and his rather more adventurous contribution to human consciousness. Whatever the explanation, I thought the sensible thing was to give the whole bizarre psychological experiment a rest and find myself a distraction.

And what better distraction is there than fishing? Fishing has the enormous advantage that, once you're beside the river, your brain has very little opportunity to worry about anything other than where the fish might be and whether you've got enough bait, which in my case is particularly useful because I can barely think about two things simultaneously without something going catastrophically wrong.

I had an hour to spare after work before the demands of domestic diary-making called me back to civilisation, so I decided on a quick visit to one of my local smash-and-grab spots. I'm lucky in that it's virtually on the way home from work, meaning I can get my fishing fix without requiring the logistical planning normally associated with an Arctic expedition.

When I say minimal gear, I really do mean minimal gear. Rod, reel, size 6 hook and that's about it; if I need anything else, I've clearly misunderstood the assignment. This little stretch is one I know reasonably well, particularly at the beginning of the season when the chub have a habit of hanging around. I'd visited before my holiday, though, and the chub had apparently decided that my company was beneath them and relocated themselves into the pool upstream.

Unfortunately, that particular pool is about as accessible as the vault at Fort Knox. 

You could probably reach it in waders up to your armpits ,but getting a decent chub out once hooked would involve the sort of aquatic gymnastics for which I'm neither sufficiently young nor sufficiently enthusiastic. Still, there was a bit more water in the river now, and that can make all the difference. So I thought I'd have another go and see whether the chub had returned or whether they'd taken permanent residence somewhere with better security.

I started with surface bread, which is always a pleasing way to fish because it makes you feel slightly like a Victorian gentleman feeding ducks, only with considerably more concentration and a hook concealed somewhere in the bakery department. The trouble with chub is that they know exactly what bread is, and they also know exactly what a hook is, which makes them rather less cooperative than the pigeons.

Those pieces of bread were going down completely unhindered, which suggested one of two things: either the chub weren’t in residence, or they were there but had collectively decided to observe a strict carbohydrate-free diet. Then, right at the very tail end of the swim, there was a swirl  not exactly a biblical revelation, but certainly enough of a fish showing to make me wonder whether I’d been prematurely writing the swim off.

The problem was that getting a fish out of there would have been difficult, to put it mildly, with enough snags lurking about to make the swim look less like a fishing opportunity and more like an obstacle course designed by someone who genuinely disliked anglers. Still, I bookmarked it mentally, because if there is one thing fishing teaches you, it is that the places you convince yourself are impossible are invariably the places you spend the next six months thinking about.

So I made my way downstream to a few swims that normally produce fish, although with the extra water on, the river had a bit more flow and those little areas where the chub usually hang about were conspicuously devoid of chub. I peered into likely spots, stared into dark corners, and generally behaved like a man who had misplaced something expensive, despite the fact that I was actually looking for a fish that had absolutely no obligation whatsoever to be there.

Then, just to add a touch of rural theatre to proceedings, a horse decided to follow me down towards the bridge swim. I was half expecting it to ask whether I’d seen any chub, but instead it got knee-deep into the water and began enthusiastically harvesting the rich pickings from the reeds and bullrushes downstream, apparently having worked out the fishing wasn’t going particularly well and deciding to get on with something productive.

I did manage a chublet, which after four or five tentative nudges at the bread finally decided that one more go was going to be its downfall. Unfortunately for it, this time it found a hook rather than the usual free lunch, although it was hardly the stamp of fish I had travelled through the countryside expecting to meet.

It was, however, perfectly respectable, and after a brief encounter I returned it to its watery abode, where I assume it immediately went back to telling its mates about the terrifying near-death experience involving a suspiciously fluffy piece of bread. I meanwhile stood there wondering whether this was genuinely how the session was going to end, with my fishing ambitions reduced from “proper chub” to “something that could probably fit through a letterbox”.

With my tail firmly between my legs, I decided on one final attempt in the first swim, because apparently disappointment makes you more determined rather than more sensible. This time I concentrated on the snag pit away from the main river, where there was a much slower piece of water, which was encouraging, although the word “snags” was doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in that description.

I flicked a few pieces of crust onto the surface and, wearing the polarised sunglasses that make every angler feel briefly like Jacques Cousteau, I could see the silhouettes of several chub milling around below. 

They were definitely there, which was encouraging, although their attitude towards my carefully presented floating bread was roughly equivalent to mine when someone offers me a spotted dick with gloopy cold custard.

They simply weren’t interested in taking it off the surface, so I decided to change tactics. 

Now, I assume chub are rather like us although hopefully with fewer problems concerning council tax and the price of petrol in that they possess both animal instinct and a more rational side capable of assessing whether something looks suspicious.

On one side are our animal instincts, developed over millions of years of evolution and designed to keep us alive, while on the other sits the rational brain, constantly calculating, cogitating and occasionally wondering why on earth we thought buying another fishing rod was a sensible financial decision. The chub, presumably, had arrived at the conclusion that floating bread was suspicious, but perhaps had yet to develop the ability to question its own existence, mortgage rates or whether it had chosen the correct swim in life.

So a piece of bread went onto the hook, dipped into the water and was squeezed, and squeezed again, until it became something resembling a small soggy dumpling with a criminal record. This time it was slow sinking, and after a strategic and, I thought, rather magnificent underarm flick, I watched it disappear underneath the raft while using my forefinger to feel the line.

About ten seconds passed, during which I became increasingly convinced that absolutely nothing was happening and that I had once again managed to turn a straightforward fishing exercise into an unnecessarily complicated experiment in disappointment. Then I felt the line tighten, struck, and immediately discovered that the fish at the other end had considerably more enthusiasm for the proceedings than I did.

Now, you only had to look at the swim to realise that this wasn’t going to be a polite little fight conducted in open water with the fish eventually swimming obligingly into the net. This was going to be carnage, and with a tippy barbel rod in my hands I was going to have to bully the fish away from every branch, root, twig and other item of aquatic furniture it had thoughtfully positioned itself beside.

“YOU HEATHEN, MICK,” I could almost hear the traditionalists shouting from the bankside hedges, horrified that someone had dared use a tippy barbel rod for a chub. But at this point I wasn’t particularly interested in conforming to angling etiquette, because etiquette is generally of limited use when a decent chub is attempting to introduce itself to a snag at high speed.

The ensuing battle would probably have earned an audition for Best Fighting Chub on Britain’s Got Talent, assuming there is a category for fish that spend several minutes trying to make an angler question every decision that led them to that particular stretch of river. Eventually, however, it gave up, rolled over and seemed to say, “Please net me, I’ve had enough of this,” which was an offer I was more than happy to accept.

So I did exactly that, because there are some things you simply don’t argue with when fishing decent fish, snag-infested swims and the sudden appearance of a net in front of a chub that has just spent several minutes trying to dismantle your tackle. Things you do to catch fish, eh?

And there it was, a proper chub, and suddenly the earlier chublet seemed less like a disappointing consolation prize and more like an important piece of narrative development. From a little chublet nibbling at bread to a proper chub trying to rearrange the underwater architecture, the session had somehow managed to redeem itself.

It had taken little more than an hour, but that was all the fishing fix required, really. No epic twelve-hour campaign, no bivvy, no alarms screaming through the night and certainly no need to explain to anyone why you have spent half a day sitting beside a river staring at a piece of bread.

Just a river, a few pieces of crust, a horse, a handful of suspicious chub and one fish that eventually decided to cooperate after being subjected to what was, frankly, an unnecessarily stressful audition for Britain's Got Talent. Sometimes that’s all you need, well maybe a tussle with Sofía Vergara might be nice, a memorable fish, a ridiculous little adventure and enough material to convince yourself that the next session will obviously be even better.

Warwickshire Avon - Perambulation and Perturbation

Well, the session didn't exactly get off to the most auspicious of starts, although to be fair, down here it’s generally about as peaceful as Piccadilly Circus at rush hour, only with more bivvies and considerably less public transport. 

As I pulled into the car park, there was already a van positioned broadside across the swim I’d intended to fish, with its occupants apparently settled in for the duration, having brought enough tackle to suggest they were either planning a week-long campaign or preparing to excavate the Avon. Rod pods, gear everywhere and what appeared to be a takeaway on the go completed the scene, because apparently barbel fishing now requires catering facilities.

I looked downstream towards Plan B, only to see the unmistakable silhouette of line stretching across the water after another angler had just cast out. Bugger. As I sat there contemplating whether Plan C was actually going to be Plan Z, another bloke appeared carrying a rod pod, closely followed by his missus lugging what looked like a moon chair, heading towards one of the convenient swims adjacent to the car park, presumably because walking more than twelve yards from the car was considered an unreasonable hardship. 

I eventually settled on Plan C, which was upstream to Neil from the garage's peg, or Buffalo Si's sloppy seconds, otherwise known as ‘last year's hot peg’, although despite its reputation it’s still a decent bit of river and one that ALWAYS seems to produce. It’s only about eighteen minutes from home, but I don't fish it that often because, Jesus Christ, it sees some foot traffic. 

Not just anglers who seem intent on pouring enough bait into the river to qualify as civil engineering, but the great unwashed too, all wandering about with dogs, children, sandwiches and absolutely no awareness whatsoever that somebody might actually be trying to fish. 

Still, I lowered the bag and rod, ready for a relatively short session from 6.30pm until a nadger past dusk, and immediately my rod caught the little elastic strap on the smiley acid-house bracelet Sam had bought me.

The elastic stretched, twanged and surrendered to the laws of physics, sending all the tiny smiley faces exploding in every direction like a psychedelic hand grenade. 

There I was, crawling around amongst the detritus of the peg to retrieve tiny yellow faces while simultaneously wondering whether this was some sort of omen. Clearly it was, and I shall have to order another bracelet, although next time I may choose something less emotionally and mechanically fragile, such as a length of chain.

Eventually I got myself sorted and started setting up, at which point a long, grey-haired fella appeared with a couple of dogs which, judging by their behaviour, had either never attended a training class or had been expelled from one. They proceeded to run all over the peg I'd chosen, sniffing around for anything edible and generally conducting themselves like two furry members of a forensic investigation team. It turns out they were, as their owner cheerfully explained, ‘luncheon meat monsters’, which did at least explain why they were treating my fishing gear as though it had been served up on a buffet.

The same performance occurred on my return, despite me having a word with their owner, who appeared to regard my concerns with all the urgency of someone being told the kettle had boiled. Still, I resisted the temptation to feed him to the dogs and carried on. Shortly afterwards three perfectly pleasant Eastern European lads came wandering along, roving around chucking lures left, right and centre, including, naturally, directly through the areas I was fishing.

“Come on fellas, there are plenty of pegs to fish, can't you see I'm fishing here?” I politely enquired, receiving the sort of response that suggested they regarded my stationary rod, baited hook and general angling activity as an unnecessarily dull interruption to their mobile entertainment. 

Apparently they liked to move around when lure fishing and didn't do the “boring fishing” that I did, which was fair enough, although I did briefly consider demonstrating just how boring I could make a fishing rod by inserting it somewhere inconvenient. Eventually, mercifully, the chaos subsided. The dogs disappeared, the lure chuckers moved on, the banks emptied and the riverbank finally became quiet, which suited me perfectly because I am, by my own admission, something of a misanthrope. 

This particular stretch is normally rammed with fish, largely because it receives enough bait to keep a small aquatic population in permanent employment, and the Avon here is effectively the all-you-can-eat buffet of Warwickshire. Barbel, chub and everything else hang around because there is always something dropping through the water column, which makes the complete lack of action that followed even more baffling.

The target was barbel, so I primed the swim with a scaled pellet and groundbait mix, allowing it to settle on the bottom before giving things a rest. Tactics were deliberately simple: a Robin Red drilled pellet on the hair, accompanied by a small PVA bag of freebies, which has been my usual approach of late. Because I was only fishing a short smash-and-grab session into dusk, I deliberately made the hair longer than normal, hoping to be a little more selective and perhaps avoid the attentions of every small chub, gudgeon and aquatic idiot that fancied a nibble.

I needn't have worried about being selective. Despite decent fish showing, not only in my swim but in the areas immediately to my left and right, the rod remained about as animated as as Trigger's broom handle leaning against a shed.  

Not even a chub pull materialised, which on this stretch is frankly bizarre, rather like turning up at an all-you-can-eat buffet to discover that the entire kitchen has gone home. I moved the bait around the swim, tried a few different spots and found a reassuringly satisfying thud as the lead hit bottom, so presentation was clearly fine.

And yet… nothing. Not a tap, not a knock, not even the sort of pathetic little twitch that allows you to convince yourself afterwards that you definitely had a bite but were simply too slow to react. As darkness crept in, the fish continued to show themselves with the sort of calculated indifference usually reserved for people you owe money to, while my bait sat beneath them apparently invisible. 

Eventually I called time, packed away and headed home wondering quite how a place that normally resembles a barbel branch of Tesco's had managed to close its doors for the evening.

So, all in all, not exactly the session I'd envisaged. I arrived to a human traffic jam, lost my acid house bracelet, had my swim invaded by luncheon-meat-obsessed dogs, had lures fired through my fishing area and then spent the evening watching decent fish show everywhere except on the end of my hook.

Still, that's fishing, I suppose, and perhaps the Avon was simply having one of those evenings where it had decided that despite providing everyone else with an all-you-can-eat buffet, my table reservation had mysteriously been cancelled.

On a better note, a link to the River Severn Trip with Nic from Avon Angling where I actually catch some fish !!

Warwickshire Avon - The Untrodden Pt.54

I was genuinely surprised the other day when Sam announced that he wanted to go fishing. This is becoming something of a rare event these days, a bit like seeing a kingfisher in a swim you've been baiting for three weeks, because getting a fifteen-year-old out of bed and away from a screen requires planning, negotiation and, on occasion, the sort of psychological warfare normally reserved for hostage situations.

Like his mother, Sam has developed a rather healthy appreciation of his bed, although at his age I suppose I can't really complain. The difference is that when I was fifteen I wasn't particularly interested in sleeping until lunchtime because I was too busy roaming the streets, riding my BMX, building dens and generally doing things which, viewed from the perspective of adulthood, probably involved considerably more opportunities for serious injury than I realised at the time.

Fishing was also a big part of it, and I remember cycling over to Somers in Meriden with my brother, rods strapped to our BMXs, probably looking like a couple of Victorian chimney sweeps who had somehow acquired bicycles. We thought nothing of it, whereas today if I suggested Sam cycled several miles to a stretch of river with a fishing rod attached to his bike, I'd probably have Social Services, the police and holier than thou Chris Packham turning up on the doorstep.

Of course, times change, and gaming is a massive part of young people's lives now. Those lockdowns certainly didn't help, although when you're stuck indoors for weeks on end with your mates available only through a headset, I suppose Call of Duty, Siege and whatever else the kids are playing these days became the equivalent of sitting on the wall outside the chippy and talking complete rubbish for six hours.

Sam's latest enthusiasm for fishing was partly driven by a Temu purchase, which immediately raised my eyebrows because I'm not entirely convinced that the words 'Temu' and 'quality fishing tackle' have ever previously appeared in the same sentence. Still, he'd bought himself a pike lure for about £1.50, a multi-jointed affair which, to be perfectly honest, didn't look half bad when I inspected it.

I'd expected something which would fall apart if a pike so much as looked at it, but it actually appeared reasonably well made. I suppose for £1.50 you can't expect it to come with a certificate from the British Standards Institution, a handwritten note from the lure maker and a small gold-plated plaque commemorating its birth, but it certainly looked capable of catching something.

The other part of the Temu order was rather more difficult to explain. Sam had purchased a balaclava, black ski goggles and a propeller hat, which is a combination that raises rather more questions than it answers and isn't something you generally expect to see assembled together unless you've accidentally wandered onto the set of a low-budget Scandinavian children's television programme.

Apparently this is connected with playing Siege, where he likes to dress in the sort of sweatshop-produced tactical gear that makes him look like a counter-terrorism operative who's been sent to neutralise a particularly dangerous gang of pike. I decided not to ask too many questions, because frankly I'm happier knowing less.

Anyway, the syndicate stretch is ideal for a short session, so there was no need for one of those ridiculous 4.00am starts that I used to consider perfectly normal and now regard as a form of self-inflicted sleep deprivation. These days I'm rather enjoying my bed myself, and by just gone eight o'clock we were ready to go, with Sam actually prepared before me, which was a slightly disturbing indication that something important was happening.

The conditions weren't exactly screaming 'lure fishing bonanza', but we'd come to fish, so fish we would. Sam headed off with his £1.50 Temu pike impersonator while I prepared myself for the more sedate pursuit of perch and chublets with a smaller Salmo Hornet, because apparently I'd reached the stage of life where catching a six-ounce perch had become an entirely acceptable objective.

Then, about five casts in, came the shout every parent who takes their offspring fishing wants to hear.

"I've got one on! I've got one on!"

There was a slight pause before the second declaration, delivered with considerably more certainty and volume.

"It's a pike! It's a pike!"

And, remarkably, he was absolutely right.

I looked over and there it was, a decent pike which I'd estimate at around five or six pounds, and suddenly that £1.50 Temu lure had gone from being an amusing experiment to the most expensive object on the bank because, as we all know, once a lure catches a fish it becomes priceless.

I grabbed the landing net and headed over, and Sam was doing exactly what he needed to do, keeping the fish moving and trying to prevent it from finding the nearest bit of underwater vegetation. Unfortunately, the landing net was at full stretch and the pike had other ideas, heading off to the right with Sam having to apply some serious side strain to stop it disappearing into the snaggy bits.

For a moment it looked as though we'd got it beaten.

The fish was coming towards the net, the Temu lure was hanging out of its mouth, Sam was concentrating like a bomb disposal expert and I was standing there with the net thinking this was all going remarkably well considering we'd spent approximately the price of a packet of crisps on the lure.

And then the pike launched itself out of the water.

Under the tension of the line it somehow managed to throw the hooks, and in the blink of an eye we went from 'that's a lovely fish' to 'Damn it!!!'

There are few sounds in fishing more depressing than the collective groan produced by an angler and his dad when a good fish falls off at the net. Sam was absolutely gutted, and I was gutted for him, because when you've watched your son hook a decent pike within five casts, the fish has already become something much larger in your imagination than it actually was.

It was probably twenty pounds by the time we got home, judging by the way these things normally develop.

Still, that's pike fishing, and there wasn't much Sam could do about it. He carried on fishing the swim and had a couple more follows and one or two snatched attempts, but nothing properly connected, so eventually we decided to have a wander and see if we could find anything else willing to participate in our little Temu-sponsored expedition.

We went on the rove, both of us now fishing lures, although I'd sensibly downsized to the Salmo Hornet in the hope of finding a perch or perhaps one of the Avon chublets. Sam continued with the pike tackle, presumably confident that another aquatic missile was waiting beneath the surface to redeem the previous one.

Sadly, the river had other plans.

It was tough as old boots.

We worked our way along the stretch, casting likely spots and covering different bits of water, but the expected procession of perch, chub and pike failed to materialise. It was one of those sessions where every swim looks as though it should contain something, but the fish have apparently received a memo informing them that today was not the day to cooperate.

Eventually Sam returned to the swim where he'd hooked the pike, which at least gave him another opportunity to torment himself by imagining the fish he'd lost. While fishing there he managed to pick up a dace on the retrieve, which he'd somehow managed to impale with the lure rather than actually catch in the conventional manner.

Fortunately the dace went back absolutely fine, so we could at least claim another species for the morning, although I'm not entirely sure 'accidentally speared by lure' is a technique that will be appearing in the next edition of Improve Your Coarse Fishing.

And that, unfortunately, was about it.

Two and a half hours of fishing produced a missed pike, a few follows, a couple of snatched attempts and one rather unfortunate dace, which isn't exactly the sort of catch report that gets the national press knocking on the door. Still, Sam had enjoyed himself, and for me that is considerably more important than filling the net.

The interesting thing is that the river can change dramatically as the light begins to disappear.

 I've always found this stretch comes alive as the light levels drop, particularly when the Avon is clear, and it can feel like you're fishing an entirely different river once dusk starts creeping in. 

During the brighter part of the day it can look almost devoid of life, but give it a bit of shade and low light and suddenly you start wondering whether every dark shape under the far bank is a chub, a barbel or something considerably more interesting.

Before we packed up, I put some more bait down in one of the swims, as I always like to do. 

There isn't much point in fishing an empty-looking swim and then simply walking away from it, particularly when you know from experience that a bit of regular bait can eventually encourage the better fish to hang around.

I'll have another go during the week, probably into dusk and beyond, and see if I can winkle out a decent chub or perhaps another barbel. The Avon has a habit of keeping a few cards close to its chest, and sometimes the best fishing begins just when the sensible people have gone home for their tea.

So, all in all, not the most productive couple of hours, but definitely one I'll remember.

Sam hooked his first pike of the session within about five casts on a £1.50 Temu lure, lost it dramatically at the net and was then reduced to catching a dace by the wrong end. Meanwhile, his dad stood there with a landing net, a Salmo Hornet and the gradually dawning realisation that perhaps the teenager who'd rather be gaming isn't quite as difficult to tempt out fishing as he'd imagined.

Perhaps the answer isn't banning the Xbox after all.

Perhaps we just need to buy more cheap Chinese fishing tackle.

Although I'm still drawing the line at the propeller hat.