Now it’s strange returning to a stretch of river that once felt like home. The kind of place where the banks used to buzz with anglers, gossip, and that one bloke who always claimed he “almost had a seventeen last week,” even though his landing net was drier than my humour.
Now it feels more like walking through a forgotten chapter of a book no one remembers writing overgrown paths, quiet water, the faint smell of old bait tubs and broken dreams. Idyllic, really. The matches, still go on mind you, those keepnets not as full as they used to be !!.
Of course, the tragedy of 2023 still hangs over the Warwickshire Avon like a dodgy chip-shop curry. The “oxygen crash” or as I like to call it, The Great Fish Apocalypse That Everyone Talks About Except the People Who Should Probably Have Investigated It.
Miles of dead fish, the press involved, and an “apparently” that does a lot of heavy lifting. Pike the size of retired greyhounds, barbel shaped like torpedoes, chub with expressions of eternal disappointment... all belly-up. Grim times. Even now, when the river gives you a nibble, you almost want to whisper, “thanks for sticking around.”
Still, restocking happened, and floods do what floods do shuffle fish around like drunken tourists trying to find their hotel at 2 a.m. Little by little, life returned. Even the minnows returned more accurately, they multiplied into a biblical plague of finned pickpockets.
Which brings us to today.
The river was bowling through like it had somewhere important to be, brown and foamy like a giant latte made by an angry barista. Perfect conditions for a barbel if you believe everything written in fishing folklore and the back pages of Angling Times between mattress adverts.
Armed with a lump of spam the size of a couple of boxes of matches and groundbait so krill-infused it could probably summon a blue whale, I set up. The thermometer told me the water was 8.4°C warming nicely. A sign of hope. A sign of life. A sign that I should continue ignoring the mounting evidence that I’ve no idea what I’m doing.
What I hadn’t accounted for was the leaf debris. Oh, the debris. More debris than the leaf pile in my garden that's always staring at me, and that’s saying something because I’m still convinced there’s a tent in there under them or something.
Leaves were hitting my line like angry fan mail. Even with the rod tip high enough to make the bloke in the ISS raise an eyebrow, I was recasting every fifteen minutes, a right royal pain in the backside.
But the feeder landed with a satisfying thud each time like dropping a brick onto a wobble board. That’s how you know the bait’s fishing well. Or at least that’s what I tell myself to justify the mechanically separated meat outlay.
The spam came back every cast absolutely rinsed by minnows. Minnows everywhere. Millions of them. I’ve seen fewer people at a free beer festival. They must hold monthly council meetings discussing how best to strip my bait before an actual fish gets near it.
Two hours, not a chub pull. Not even one of those cheeky little taps that gives you false hope before turning out to be a drifting shoal of leaves shaped like disappointment. So I moved swims. Because that’s what proper anglers do when nothing is happening they relocate, re-strategize, and ultimately fail somewhere else.
The new swim lasted thirty minutes. The flow was faster, the debris was worse, and the line looked like it had been decorated for Christmas by someone with a personal vendetta against me. So back I went to the original swim. The one that had produced that double-figure barbel just weeks earlier. My “hero swim.” My “golden memory spot.” My “please work again because I’m emotionally invested in you now” swim.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
The river looked bang on. Moody and atmospheric. A nice slick glide. A bait presented so well it should’ve come with a Michelin star. Yet the rod remained as lifeless as a pub garden in February.
And here’s the weird thing: I still loved it.
There’s something deeply satisfying about fishing in conditions that most right-thinking people would describe as “utterly pointless.” Something calming in the futile battle against nature, minnows, and the creeping suspicion that every barbel in Warwickshire has conspired against you personally.
Because that’s fishing, isn’t it?
Ninety percent stubbornness, five percent misplaced optimism, four percent spam, and one percent actual success. I packed up with cold hands, a muddy arse, and zero bites but a big stupid grin because challenging days on the river are still better than good days doing anything else.
Besides, the minnows need someone to feed them.
I’ll be back, where are all the other anglers ? answers on a postcard.
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