Warwickshire Stour - Osmiferousbreaminality AND Turbiditationalism

There are times on the Warwickshire Stour when you feel less like an angler and more like an unpaid extra in a low-budget natural history documentary entitled Men Who Persist Despite All Available Evidence. This winter has been one of those times. 

The Warks Stour Power WhatsApp group normally a place of mild exaggeration, heroic selfies, and suspiciously well-timed PBs has recently taken on the tone of a grief counselling session chaired by a damp keepnet. Three men. One river. And a collective inability to get anything resembling consistency out of it.

The trio in question are, of course, myself (the roaming optimist), Nic of Avon Angling fame (who knows this river better than the fish themselves), and George “I Don’t Blog Any More” Burton, who despite the name has begun the New Year obsessed with the idea of a big Stour roach an obsession that places him somewhere between dedicated specimen hunter and man waiting for a bus that may never come.

Now the Stour has been patchy. Not “a bit hit and miss” patchy, but Jekyll and Hyde with a landing net patchy. Hit it right and you’re into chub as if they’ve formed a queue. Miss it by a matter of hours and you could spend the entire session communing with gudgeon that nibble like Victorian pickpockets. Only a short while ago I had seven chub in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it session, each one convincing me I’d cracked the code. The very next day? Naff all most likely. Not even a courtesy knock.

Nic, being a man of science (or at least a man who sounds scientific when holding a glass of water), reckons it’s all down to water colour. And I suspect he’s onto something. He’d fished it when the river was still charging through, but the colour oh the colour was that unmistakable Stour green. Not a pleasant mossy green. Not a healthy aquatic green. More like the colour the Hulk might produce after a heavy night involving lime slush puppies and a Midori Sour chaser. Visibility somewhere between “murky” and “why bother wearing polarised glasses at all.”

When the Stour’s in proper flood, chocolate brown and angry, it can actually fish well. Those canals in spitting distance turbidity, the fish lose their paranoia, and those old, streetwise roach the ones with PhDs in hook avoidance suddenly fancy a wander. They know the drill. Brown water means fewer fins brushing their flanks and fewer beady-eyed anglers staring into their souls. Confidence, it turns out, is a murky thing.

So off I went, roving like a man with optimism but no plan, alternating between half a lobworm and bread, with liquidised bread laced with geranium essential oil squeezed lovingly into the feeder. Yes, geranium. Don’t ask. I read it somewhere once, probably at midnight, probably written by a man who owns more tweed than sense.

The conditions were, frankly, abysmal. A cold wind gusting like it had a personal vendetta against my quivertip. Bites were less “tap tap” and more “was that the wind or my imagination?” Not exactly textbook stuff, but then needs must when the river calls and the canals are still sulking in the background.

And then because fishing is nothing if not a cruel performance artist within ten minutes I had rattly bites on the one-ounce tip in the very swim that produced my PB river roach. I struck. 

The rod hooped. And for approximately three seconds I was connected to destiny. Roach? Chublet? I’ll never know. It felt right. It felt silvery. And then it was gone, leaving only a slack line and that hollow feeling anglers carry far longer than any fish.

After that, swim after swim delivered nothing but nibbles. Tiny fish with ambition vastly exceeding mouth capacity. Strikes that connected with nothing but hope. 

 At one point I deployed the “get out of jail card” those woody swims that usually cough up at least something but even they merely offered more pecking and more disappointment. Even the chub didn't show after switching to an all out bread feeder attack. 

Four hours later I was staring down the barrel of a blank. A proper one. The sort that seeps into your bones and makes you question past life choices. Meanwhile, downstream, George was into bream. And not just bream good’uns. Slabs. 

The sort of fish that arrive uninvited and leave your landing net smelling like a trawler’s sock drawer. It just goes to show what can turn up in this river as it winds through open farmland, quietly ignoring our theories and plans. 

On the plus side, my landing net remained blissfully free of bream slime, my garage was spared, and domestic harmony was preserved. Small victories matter.

Still, I’m fed up with floodwater now. Properly fed up. The romance has worn thin. The Stour will do what it wants, when it wants, and explain nothing. I’m not quite ready to retreat to the canals just yet but the thought is there, hovering, like a backup plan written in pencil.

Until then, we’ll keep going. Because sometimes the blank is part of the story. And sometimes, just sometimes, the river gives you three seconds of magic enough to keep you coming back for the next chapter