The river greeted me like an old mate who’s borrowed twenty quid and still hasn’t paid it back familiar, slightly guilty looking, and a touch murkier than expected. After yesterday’s minor miracle of winkling out a few chub on cheesepaste (blessed be the stinky cube of dairy-based hope), I swaggered down to the syndicate stretch convinced absolutely convinced that I could replicate the magic. I even whispered to myself, “Lightning does strike twice, doesn’t it?” as though I was the lead character in some low-budget angling documentary with questionable narration.
But the fishing gods, much like the weather forecast, enjoy lying.
Negotiating the entrance track felt like starring in a budget remake of Ice Road Truckers, only in this version the road is made of sloppy Worcestershire mud and the truck is a slightly bewildered Suzuki Jimny, which I’m fairly sure weighs less than a Labrador with a healthy appetite. Still, up it climbed a tiny automotive mountain goat with the determination of a toddler going for the last sausage roll at a birthday party. By the time I parked up behind the first swim, I was already congratulating myself on both the Jimny’s heroics and my questionable life choices.
Only then did I remember from the WhatsApp group chat : TRACK CLOSED UNTIL IT DRIES OUT. Marvellous. Typical. Exactly the sort of thing you want to discover after you’ve already slithered your way in like a penguin on a slip-n-slide. To be fair I lied, it was a doddle !!
But seeing as I was now effectively committed or possibly should be committed I decided it was a case of in for a penny, in for a soggy, mud-caked pound. The plan was simple, even elegant: bait a few likely chub haunts with stinky cheesepaste, wait for the tip to rattle, claim victory, go home smelling slightly worse than when I arrived.
A flawless strategy, I thought.
Except the first bite came from a minnow clearly experiencing an early life crisis. It inhaled my cheesepaste like it was auditioning for Britain’s Got Talent: Sword Swallowing Edition. A minnow! On cheesepaste! The river’s smallest resident had gambled big and, sadly for my pride, won. Still, the blank was technically avoided, even if the victory felt a bit like getting a round of applause for tying your shoelaces at age forty.
Down the stretch I trudged, disturbing a cormorant who gave me a look that suggested I was the one ruining its fishing. It flapped off like an indignant Victorian aunt, its day clearly ruined by my mere presence. I primed several swims with stealthy nuggets of cheesepaste and a little mashed bread the angling equivalent of throwing out free samples in the hope someone buys the full product.
Five swims, countless casts, two hundred and seventeen internal monologues about why I bother, and what did I get?
Nothing. Not a chub pull. Not a pluck. Not even the courtesy of a half-hearted nod from something small and uninterested. My bread was getting mullered by minnow, of course the aquatic equivalent of a late night kebab van: always busy, never what you actually want.
Yet and this is the sort of thing non-anglers simply will never grasp I still enjoyed myself. The frosts had revealed parts of the river I’ve not been able to access since approximately the Bronze Age. I discovered two swims that, when the river is lower and behaving itself, look like they could hold chub of suspicious girth. Proper ones. The kind that make you double-take, mutter “Oof, hello”, and wonder whether you need a bigger landing net.
And that’s the strange thing about fishing. Success isn’t measured solely by what you catch, but by the moments of promise, the gentle ridiculousness of the whole affair, and the sheer stubborn optimism that keeps you returning to the water’s edge when any sane person would stay inside and do something sensible… like hoovering, or taxes, or literally anything that doesn’t involve being up to your ankles in cold mud while debating whether a bird just judged you.
So while the chub were clearly off having a committee meeting elsewhere, ignoring me completely, the morning wasn’t wasted. Far from it. It was reconnaissance. It was fresh air. It was ridiculous, muddy, fishless, minnow-ridden joy.
On to the next one because someone has to give those chub a talking-to, and it might as well be me.
0 comments:
Post a Comment