Warwickshire Avon - The Untrodden Pt.53

So, we're back in business then, although whether that's good news for anyone other than me is open to debate. I have no doubt that several readers have been sitting patiently by their laptops, refreshing the page every six minutes, wondering whether I'd finally run out of things to waffle about, only to discover that sadly I have returned and, rather like Japanese Knotweed, appear to be almost impossible to eradicate.

The first day back at work after the August excesses started reasonably enough, although it wasn't long before I encountered something that reminded me that I'm clearly earning money in entirely the wrong profession. I wandered back from my lunchtime walk towards the main building and there, sitting outside the entrance, was a rather enormous Range Rover that I initially walked straight past without giving it a second glance.

Now apparently, however, this wasn't just any old Range Rover but the new electric one, which explained why several people seemed to be standing around it looking considerably more interested than I was. Once I'd been informed of the specification, I suddenly became very interested indeed, although mainly in the sense that you become interested when someone tells you the price of a bottle of wine after you've already ordered it.

Nearly three tonnes, around 370 miles of claimed range from a 118.5 kWh battery and prices starting somewhere around £150,000 before you've started clicking the options box like a lottery winner. That's a huge battery by the way as it will take approximately 17 to 19 hours to charge from 0% to 100% on a standard 7kW home charger.

Apparently they can wander north of £250,000 once you've ticked enough expensive little boxes, which is quite handy because if you've got that sort of money lying around, you're unlikely to be worrying about whether your bait bill has got slightly out of hand this month.

I have to say, though, it was an impressive thing in the flesh. Massive doesn't really do it justice, and I'm fairly sure you could lose a small family in the back of it and not discover them again until the following Tuesday. 

Cars just seem to be getting bigger and bigger and someone that works in a design studio on cars that will be out in 4-5 years that's not changing !!, at this rate the next Range Rover will require planning permission, a runway and possibly its own postcode.

It did get me thinking about the little Suzuki Jimny which is a 1/3 of the weight, otherwise known as the Mountain Goat, which in a couple of weeks will somehow be seven years old. Seven years! I can still remember writing the first blog post about buying the bloody thing from new, although apparently time moves considerably quicker when you're driving around in something that looks like a Tonka toy with number plates.

It's been absolutely brilliant, though, and hasn't missed a beat. It's probably the easiest vehicle I've ever owned to like, largely because it has absolutely no interest in pretending to be something it isn't, and while the new Range Rover could probably cross the Atlantic with the correct optional extras, the Jimny would be quite happy bouncing over a muddy field while making noises that suggest it needs urgent medical attention.

In fact, I reckon you could probably put the Jimny in the boot of the new Range Rover if you gave it a decent shove and ignored several minor issues concerning dimensions, suspension geometry and the laws of physics. The new Range Rover really is a behemoth, and although I'm sure it's lovely to drive, I think I'll stick with the Mountain Goat for a while yet.

Besides, after a month of considerably more eating and drinking than was strictly necessary, I suspect I am currently approaching the same gross vehicle weight as the Jimny and driver combined. August has been a spectacular success in that department, so with the weather finally looking a little more conducive to fishing and a month off the grog now underway, I'm hoping the waistline will gradually return to something resembling its previous shape.

There are worse ways of doing it than sitting beside a river, although I'm not entirely convinced that consuming several packets of biscuits while waiting for a bite constitutes an effective weight-loss strategy. 

Still, every journey begins with a single step, and mine apparently begins with having a cuppa.

Anyway, back to the fishing, which was the whole point of this particular excursion despite the lengthy automotive and dietary diversion. 

The evenings are drawing in alarmingly quickly now, with dusk arriving at around 8.25pm, which seems ridiculous because I'm fairly certain it was light until about half past eleven last week.

Before we know it we'll be talking about Christmas, which means mince pies will be appearing in the shops, people will be putting decorations up in November and I'll be wondering where another year has disappeared to. 

I therefore decided to make the most of the remaining daylight and fish into darkness, which also gave me a good excuse to sit beside the river for several hours without anyone expecting me to do anything productive.

I'd chosen the syndicate stretch for this one, with the vague intention of catching a fish and the much firmer intention of not doing anything remotely complicated. I had considered targeting barbel, especially as I'd caught one here fairly recently, but if I'm honest I fancied a chub more.

Chub have always been a favourite of mine, proper characters of fish that seem to spend most of their lives looking suspiciously at whatever you've thrown in the river before eventually deciding that perhaps eating it isn't such a bad idea after all. They're also particularly satisfying when you're trying to winkle one out, because there's something rather pleasing about fooling a fish that's spent twenty minutes staring at your bait as though it has just spotted you trying to sell it a timeshare.

There was another reason for fancying the chub, too. I've done particularly well using Robin Red pellets on the Avon, and while the fish obviously don't read my blog and therefore aren't aware that this particular bait is supposed to be irresistible, they've certainly developed a taste for it.

The plan was therefore straightforward enough: a couple of Robin Red baits hair-rigged, a small PVA bag of freebies alongside them, and a decent pre-baited swim to fish into dusk and beyond. Nothing clever, no laboratory equipment, no underwater drones and certainly no bait preparation involving ingredients that require a trip to three different supermarkets.

Before settling down for the evening, though, I fancied a bit of roving. Chub can sometimes give themselves away if you're prepared to look for them, particularly when there's bread involved, and I thought I'd wander through a few swims with a loaf and see whether anything fancied an early evening snack.

There is something wonderfully simple about fishing with bread. You take a loaf, tear some off, put it somewhere near a chub and wait for the fish to either eat it or look at you as though you've insulted its entire family.

Anyway when I got trackside, the farmer had kindly left the track free, presumably because the sheep were in the field and he didn't fancy scraping one off the front of my motor. Halfway down the straight I had to stop anyway, because a bloody great branch had fallen straight across the electric fence, so there I was doing my bit for the farming community and trying not to become the biggest shock of the evening.

Good deed done, I carried on to the first peg and performed a three-point turn which was probably closer to a seventeen-point turn in a Range Rover, before eventually getting myself sorted. Out went a decent helping of my heavy, spicy meat groundbait concoction, which plummeted straight to the bottom and would hopefully sit there quietly for a couple of hours before I put a bait over it, because if something works occasionally there really is no point messing about trying to improve it.

I then mashed up some bread, grabbed the light chub gear and set off roving, priming a few swims as I went that I'd fish on the way back. The Avon was still clear, certainly where I was fishing, and there was a bloody good head of water on, which looked absolutely perfect, although as we all know, rivers have a habit of looking perfect right up until they dump a chublet on your hook every thirty seconds.

The first underarm chuck with the link-ledgered bread hadn't even properly settled before something snatched it on the drop. "Bloody hell, that was quick," I thought, and it turned out the swim wasn't exactly short of residents. In fact it was absolutely rammed with fish, unfortunately they were all the sort of size that could probably swim through the eye of the hook.

That's the problem with bread at this time of year; the bait fish are still knocking around and they're bloody fearless. Give them a decent lump of bread and they'll whittle it down quicker than a bloke at the pub saying, "I'm only having one."

The chublets got stuck into the bread in most of the four swims I fished, and fair play to them, they attacked it as though they'd been waiting all week for a takeaway. Some of the bites were so violent they genuinely felt like barbel, particularly on the little chub rod with its daft little 0.5oz tip, which makes everything feel approximately three times bigger than it actually is.

I missed two BIG chub bites, although "missed" is probably being generous. I basically didn't connect with the fish because the bite was so hard the rod bent all the way round to the joint and by the time I'd worked out what the bloody hell was happening, the fish had buggered off. I wouldn't say I got bored of catching chublets, but that's precisely what happened, and I started thinking about something with a bit more attitude.

Still, I hadn't blanked, which is always a useful phrase to mutter when trying to convince yourself the evening is going brilliantly. With the wind now picking up considerably, I decided to stop poncing about with the light gear and set up stall in the prebaited swim with the bigger rod, with dusk only about forty minutes away.

Two small Robin Red pellets went on the hair, accompanied by a PVA bag of mixed pellets, and after fifteen minutes or so there was a proper whacking bite that came from absolutely nowhere. I lifted into it expecting the heavens to open and a barbel to announce its arrival, only to discover that once again the chub had beaten the bigger boys to dinner.

As the gloom settled and dusk finally arrived, there was another whack on the rod top, followed by another, and this time the fish had done me the enormous favour of hooking itself. I lifted the rod and found another chublet attached, the greedy little sod, and by now I was beginning to suspect there was a meeting of the Avon chub population directly underneath my bait.

Where the hell were the bigger fish? With the pellets mangled beyond recognition, I changed to my default much larger Robin Red pellet, giving the single bait a little more space between hair and hook. After another couple of clangs on the rod tip it seemed to be working, or at least the chub were finally beginning to realise that this particular buffet item was going to be more trouble than it was worth.

Then everything went quiet.

I sat there in the gathering darkness, listening to the river pushing through and the occasional rustle from the bank, when a barn owl appeared on the far side of the Avon. It ghosted silently across the water towards me, barely making a sound, then turned and floated downstream into the gloom, and for once I wasn't thinking about fishing, bites, bait or whether I'd remembered where I'd put the landing net.

You're bloody lucky when you see something like that. You don't get it sitting at home watching Coronation Street or Love Island, although obviously if that's your thing then crack on, I'm not here to judge, but I'd rather watch a barn owl hunting silently over a river any day of the week.

Then it happened.

One pull on the rod top and the whole bloody thing went into meltdown. The rod folded over, the reel started doing something far more interesting than it had done all evening and instantly I knew what was on the other end. "Yeap, barbel," I thought, before immediately adding, "Don't get too confident now, Mick, you've made this mistake before."

Thankfully the fish didn't seem to have received the memo about escaping. It put up a spirited battle, surging around in the darkness and making me work for it, but eventually I got it into the landing net and there it was. 

Oh yes, oh bloody yes! As Carl Cox might say, although I'm fairly sure Carl has never had to say it while standing in the dark with cold hands, a muddy backside and a barbel trying to climb out of a landing net.

It wasn't a huge fish, and in fact it felt a little hollow, but this is the Avon we're talking about. 

More than fifty sessions here and perhaps one in eight or ten produces a barbel, and most of those seem to turn up once it's properly dark, so when one does eventually come along you don't start worrying about whether it's going to break some personal best.

I didn't weigh it. There was no need. I was just chuffed to bits to have another Avon barbel in front of me, because sometimes the fish itself is the bloody trophy and the number on the scales is completely irrelevant.

I fished on for another twenty minutes or so, but nothing else happened, which was probably just as well because I was beginning to get that smug feeling that usually precedes something going horribly wrong. 

Eventually I packed up and headed back along the track, leaving the Avon behind in the darkness. It had been one of those evenings where nothing particularly spectacular happened for most of the session, yet somehow everything felt right. 

A few chublets, a barbel, a load of water, a fair bit of wind, a tree sacrificed to the electric fence and a barn owl drifting silently downstream as the light disappeared.

Not bad at all.

I drove home with a stupid grin on my face, already thinking about the next visit and wondering how long I could realistically pretend that this was all part of a carefully planned fishing campaign rather than me disappearing off to sit beside a river in the dark because I've got absolutely no sense.