Warwickshire Avon - Caneys and Carnivores

Now every serious predator angler knows that the eve of a big pike expedition requires rigorous preparation. You must check your trace wire, sharpen your treble hooks, oil your multipliers, and, most importantly, line your stomach with enough heavy-duty carbohydrate to survive a December gale.

Which is precisely why the rabble and I found ourselves at Caney’s Cider in Studley less than twenty-four hours before we were due on the water. A recommendation from blog reader and ex blogger Baz I'd been meaning to give it a go, and boy what a place with 20 ciders on offer. We were made to feel instantly comfortable right from the off which was nice and we'll be back because of that. Even the kids didn't seem to mind it and thankfully well behaved including Ben who can be noisy sometimes. 

Apparently they turn out roughly 7,000 litres of nectar a year from local Warwickshire apples, and stepping into their taproom at Victoria Works is like entering a sanctuary for weary bankside wanderers. 

We pulled up four stools and ordered a couple of pints alongside crusty ham and cheese rolls the kind of robust, jaw-straining bakery art that could double as a decent ledger weight if you ran out of lead.

As I managed a crusty Ham roll, the others chewed our their way through cheddar thick enough to draft a house upon, we discussed tactics for the next morning.

[ Crusty Roll ] + 
[ 2 Pints of Caney's ]
 = [ Complete Tactical Readiness ]

Two pints in, the mood was optimistic. The pike didn't stand a chance. The river was clear, the water temperature was dropping, and our confidence was hovering somewhere near orbit. 

Naturally, we couldn’t leave empty-handed. I left with a container filled with four pints of Redstreak—a 7.4% brew that smells like a sun-drenched autumn orchard and hits you with the torque of a twenty-pound crocodilian predator grabbing a deadbait.

"Just a nightcap to settle the pre-trip nerves," as I stowed the liquid gold by my feet in the passenger footwell of the Wife's car.

Whether we actually manage to haul a specimen pike onto the unhooking mat tomorrow morning remains to be seen. But sitting there in Studley, crusty roll crumbs on my t-shirt and four pints of 7.4% Redstreak resting in the kitchen, I reckon the trip is already a resounding triumph.

Anyway to the fishing, well it was hardly the lightning-fast, crack-of-dawn amphibious assault on the riverbank we had meticulously planned over our crusty ham and cheese rolls the afternoon before. The residual, lingering fumes of Caney’s 7.4% Redstreak cider had dictated a considerably more leisurely start to the morning, leaving us thoroughly pickled in autumn air and apple fuel

Yet, by some unholy miracle of the angling gods, Sam and I stumbled down the slippery mud-bank to find the entire sacred stretch glorious, dead quiet, and utterly devoid of competing souls.

The local grapevine had been positively buzzing with whispers that the native Esox lucius population was making frequent, tackle-busting appearances for matches and pleasure anglers alike. Naturally, steeped as we are in the ancient art of bankside paranoia, we both knew in our water-logged bones that every self-respecting pike within a five-mile radius had likely caught wind of our approach and buggered off three miles upstream to hide in the weeds.

Sam led our tactical vanguard, wielding a newly acquired topwater Ali Express Whopper Plopper—bought, I must proudly and emphatically stress, with his very own hard-earned pocket money rather than my rapidly crumbling wallet. The thing chugged through the murky currents with a hypnotic bloop-bloop-bloop like a frantic, confused water-rat, while I fished a juicy deadbait roach underneath an overdepth float into the dark, slacks just off the main channel.

We were only two swims into the campaign when the tranquil morning quiet was shattered by a sharp, urgent whisper from the peg just above me: "Daddy... an otter!" Sure enough, a whiskered river-demon glided right past the tips of our wellies without a single care in the world, casually going about his aquatic business and totally oblivious to the fact that we were supposed to be the undisputed apex predators of the venue.

Before we could recover from the wild beast's intrusion, we were joined by another brave father-and-son duo who were also out hunting freshwater crocodiles in the chill autumn air. They immediately confirmed our darkest tactical fears: the stretch had been insanely fickle of late, swinging violently between epic, legendary hauling sessions and soul-destroying, bone-chilling blanks where even the minnows went into hiding.

With the clock ticking down and despair creeping in like the river fog, Sam wisely scaled down his rig to drag out a solitary, brave little perch to save the family name from total dishonour. But a three-ounce perch does not satisfy a man who has drunk 7.4% cider, so Sam began frantically swapping out lures like a manic machine, testing soft baits, hard baits, and metal spinners to no avail to try and get a nice fish for a blog post for his Dad.

Then came the moment of supreme tactical madness the deployment of the nuclear option. Sam unclipped his gear and snapped on the single largest artificial bait in human history, an absolute behemoth of a soft-plastic monstrosity measuring well over thirty centimetres long that looked less like a lure and more like a submarine with treble hooks attached.

On the third cast, the river didn't just ripple it positively tore itself open as a terrifying, double-figure monster of a pike with a belly like a beer barrel surged out from the abyss. The creature struck the mammoth lure with the blinding speed and raw fury of a freight train, sending water erupting into the air, but somehow by some tragic twist of fate completely missed the steel hooks by a fraction of an inch before plunging back into the black depths.

Both of our hearts violently slammed against our ribs, and I am fairly certain I jumped three feet into the air as the sheer adrenaline surged through our veins. The final half-hour ticked away in a daze of trembling hands and quiet, reverent awe, with the river suddenly falling dead silent as if the monster had dragged the very atmosphere down into its lair.

We didn't land the leviathan, nor did we go home with wet unhooking mats, but as we packed up our rods in the fading afternoon light, none of it mattered in the slightest. With a wild otter passing at arm’s length, a heart-stopping surface explosion, and proper father-and-son time on the bank, it was a legendary outing and we will be back for revenge the moment the river conditions are a little better.