There are few things in angling quite as satisfying or quite as nerve-racking as watching a great slab of floating crust drift lazily towards a summer chub that has already spotted you before you've even spotted it. Clear water has a habit of making an angler feel like he's wearing a fluorescent jacket and tap shoes, while the chub sits beneath an overhanging bush looking as suspicious as a home office inspector at a cash-only car wash in Coventry.
Chub have earned their reputation for caution over generations of surviving everything that rivers, predators and anglers can throw at them. Every shadow, every misplaced footstep and every badly aimed cast is carefully logged in that thick skull of theirs before they make the unanimous committee decision to disappear in a puff of silt.
Yet for all their apparent paranoia, chub possess one wonderfully exploitable weakness: greed. They can spend five minutes inspecting a crust with the concentration of an art critic before suddenly deciding that if they don't eat it immediately, another chub surely will.
That's precisely why floating bread is such a deadly summer tactic when the water resembles polished glass. Instead of trying to convince a wary fish to grub about on the bottom, you're simply offering what looks like an easy, natural meal drifting straight into its dining room. No Heath Robinson tactics here, a hook and a piece of bread.
The beauty of surface fishing is that you become part angler and part theatre audience. Every drift carries the possibility of a fish rising with all the stealth of a submarine or all the subtlety of an overeager Staffy chasing a sausage.
Of course, presenting the bread is only half the battle. The other half involves resisting the overwhelming urge to strike the instant you see a pair of white lips appear beneath the crust, because chub have an uncanny talent for making you look ridiculous while they calmly mouth your bait and spit it back out.
Summer chub are often at their most relaxed during warm, settled conditions when insects, seeds and all manner of edible morsels are constantly dropping into the river. In those moments their guard, though never completely lowered, slips just enough for confidence to overcome caution, and that's exactly the opportunity the patient floater angler waits for.
Stealth is everything, mind you. Crawl if you must, wear dull clothing and avoid skylining yourself on the bank, because the average clear-water chub seems capable of detecting a badly tied shoelace from twenty yards away.
When it all comes together, though, surface fishing for chub is one of angling's purest spectacles. There is no quivertip to stare at, no electronic gadget to beep, just a drifting crust, a widening bow wave and the sort of heart-thumping anticipation that reminds you why people become hopelessly addicted to rivers in the first place.
And when that great bronze flank finally rolls beneath the bread before engulfing it with glorious confidence, you'll almost convince yourself you've outwitted the cleverest fish in the river. The truth, of course, is that the chub simply forgot to be suspicious for five glorious seconds which, thankfully for us, is usually about four seconds longer than we actually need.
People often tell me how lucky I am because I finish at lunchtime on a Friday. What they conveniently forget is that by then I've already ticked off forty-three of my forty-five hours, so it's hardly an early finish. It's more like being let out for good behaviour after serving a full sentence.
The good news is there is finally some light at the end of a very long tunnel. In another four and a bit years I'll be hanging my work boots up for good after forty years of graft. I suppose you could call it early retirement, although after four decades of work I think I've earned the right to swap deadlines for dawns on the river.
To be fair, work hasn't been all doom and gloom over the years. I've had some cracking jobs, met some brilliant people and built up such a good network in angling that I'm forever turning work down these days. I never imagined I'd reach a point where I'd rather spend an afternoon watching a piece of bread drift downstream than earning another few quid, but that's exactly where I've ended up.
Anyway, enough about work because fishing is far more interesting. I headed over to the Warwickshire Avon where Nic from Avon Angling was guiding Patron and blog reader Richard Clapp not too far away. Before long they wandered over looking suspiciously pleased with themselves, which is never a good sign when you're still waiting for your first proper chance.
They had managed around eighteen fish in just three hours for something like sixty pounds of fish trotting maggots. Sixty pounds is an incredible catch by anyone's standards and the aerial footage made it look like somebody had tipped a giant pan of chub soup into the river but you will have to wait for the video. Everywhere you looked there seemed to be fish, and they were certainly making the most of the bread going in.
My own session wasn't quite so hectic, but I wasn't complaining. I managed three lovely chub from around the weir, the best going four and a half pounds with the smallest around the three-pound mark. They're such spooky fish that once you've caught one from a particular spot, the rest disappear as though somebody has sounded the underwater fire alarm.
One fish came from the slack water after I'd watched the smaller fish demolish every floating crust I threw at them.
I changed to a slow-sinking piece of bread and that proved too much for one decent chub to ignore. It drifted down naturally and the fish confidently took it without a second thought, which unfortunately turned out to be a very expensive mistake.
Later on I wandered beyond the weir and stumbled across a group of big chub in what could only be described as a suicidal swim, yes I took a video, but didn't bother trying to catch one.
They happily shared almost an entire loaf of bread between them without showing the slightest bit of caution. Greedy doesn't even begin to describe them, and if bread had feelings it would probably have reported them for bullying.
Not far away several big bream were cruising lazily around some lily pads. They looked settled and catchable until a narrowboat came chugging through with all the subtlety of a bulldozer.
Within seconds every single bream had vanished, leaving me wondering whether they'd swum off or simply evaporated.
We eventually wandered back towards the weir, chatting away about fishing, rivers and all the usual nonsense that anglers somehow find endlessly entertaining.
Sometimes the company is every bit as enjoyable as the fishing itself, especially when everyone is catching fish and taking the mickey out of each other. It certainly beats talking about work.
Back at the weir the smaller fish were still attacking every floating piece of bread that landed on the surface. I flicked a slow-sinking piece right over the top of them and watched it drift gently beneath the commotion. A decent chub calmly peeled away from the cover and inhaled it without hesitation, proving once again that simple fishing often works best.
All in all it was only a couple of hours on the bank, but it was time well spent. Good company, a handful of lovely chub and plenty of laughs are more than enough to keep me smiling. Roll on the next trip because if retirement is going to look anything like this, those remaining four years might just fly by.
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