Warwickshire Avon – Smelt and Snot Rockets Pt.6

A swim of predators, a hook bait of Lamprey, it went off big time….

These freaks of nature that are neither fish, worm nor eel have survived for 360 million years, have long snake-like bodies and a sucker mouth adorned with sharp teeth worthy of any Hollywood sci-fi movie.

Think Alien !!!!

Many of the parasites feed by sucking the blood of fish, attaching to their prey with a suction disk and teeth.

What might also come as a surprise is the high regard in which scientists hold lampreys. Ecologists know that lampreys maintain the health of rivers. Medical researchers study lampreys, which have a remarkable ability to heal themselves even after severe nerve damage, an ability that could offer a way to heal spinal cord injuries.

Evolutionary biologists have discovered that lampreys are crucial in the history of life. Now Lampreys were among the first backboned animals to evolve, so these fish carry important clues about our ultimate origins. Lampreys look a little like eels. They have a long, flexible body with eyes, mouth and gills at one end, and a tail fin at the other.

People can have an almost morbid fascination with them as these blood-sucking parasites, and I can understand why, they really are like no other bait I use to catch fish, on their own I would day.

The blood that omits from a bait so small really is incredible and texture and the slimy fleshy skin like Teflon. I’ve caught Chub, Pike and Zander using it, and if wasn’t so expensive and hard to find sometimes I’d use it more.

Now Martyn from Stratford-Upon-Avon Fishing and Outdoors kindly came to my rescue and intercepted a delivery of maggots from Lanes Baits and managed to secure me another few packs of lamprey where half would be used for this session. Cannot knock the service, as I've said before, support your local tackle shop. It's simple Use or Lose !!!!

I lost what I think was a half decent Zander last time, but then we know they can be tricky buggers to effectively hook-up to, a bit hit and miss.

But then Pike can be like that as well even with a bait loaded with trebles, they can grasp the bait in such a way the hooks don’t get a purchase despite the float submerging like a good’un.

In that mad hour and a bit I must have had 7 or 8 runs, two fished banked and a few lost it was one of those sessions that sadly had to come to an end before I’d liked it to.

Again a short after work session, two rods, two hours !!!!

With the river now on the fall after being up and coloured after lots of rain the weekend the swim sort of dictated the session. The Avon you see had been the highest it had been for a long time, but luckily this swim allows some sanctuary away from the main flow and has for me in the past produced Chub and Barbel. So I decided to fish another rod with a boilie and paste wrap for a bit of double dipping and let the deadbait do it's thing under the watch of a Gardner TLB.

Enough of the small talk, how did I get on ?

Well despite more or less having the whole stretch to myself my chosen swim for the day, the one I fished last week was occupied by someone, damn. I settled in to a swim around 100 yards downstream and got the baits out an hour before dusk.

The lamprey had interest within fifteen minutes or so, the bobbin jumping to attention, I assume it was a chub though because a run didn't develop and also on retrieval of the bait there were no teeth marks.

The water wasn't as high as I thought, a nice colour for Zander and Barbel certainly however not for Pike. Despite the day being mild the water was still freezing, however with the sun was setting it was make or break time, usually here especially where the Barbel are concerned this is the time they go on the feed. A couple of pulls on the rod top, didn't develop in to a fill blown bite, a chub again I assume.

The club rules dictated the close of the session, a walk back to the car, defeated, and another blank to add to the list.

So what to fish for the weekend, well I fancy exploring a Warwickshire Avon tributary with Sam I've not fished before, or the small stream for a big Dace, or a big Chub down the utopia swim, heck maybe even a canal Zander. Decisions, decisions. 

Warwickshire Avon – Smelt and Snot Rockets Pt.5

A few year ago now a monster-sized fish was briefly spotted by two astonished and terrified anglers on the River Nene, in the Fens, Cambridgeshire. One of the fishermen provided BBC Radio Cambridgeshire with an incredible account: “I enjoy going out on my boat.

One day we were on our boat going up towards Whittlesey and the boat suddenly juddered as if there was something large in the water. My friend and myself looked at each other and I looked down to see what we had hit. I saw the most extraordinary thing.”

He continued with the story....

“I saw the biggest fish I have ever seen in my life. I like boating and I like wildlife, but I had never seen a fish like this before. It was absolutely huge – it was over six-foot long. It was swimming alongside us and our boat had struck it and it was as if it was showing us the side of itself where the propeller had hit it and we could see the white flesh. My friend saw it and exclaimed ‘Blimey is that a dolphin?’ It was so big. We’re going to go out again this year and see if we can see it.”

 I love these sort of stories, and we as anglers being closer to waters than the layman because of our pastime are in the best position to stumble upon these abnormalities.  A sturgeon who knows but I have some stories of my own, as I know for a fact there is a huge Pike swimming around in the Avon I aptly named Pike Tyson and a gargantuan Barbel Sam named as Albuttbarbelbutt.  

A pint of maggots for the tangleator, a bait under a Pike float for me, I want to catch Pike Tyson !!!!

I blanked here last time but there were signs, good signs that the Pike were around, one fluffed take, one follow and I know from past trips here because of the availability of bait fish, those with teeth are not far away.

Here like many stretches of the rivers I fish, the predator is now the prey, otters obviously but also the ever increasing numbers of cormorants that appear during winter in these waters that have bait fish in abundance and are easy pickings to satisfy their bellies.

When it’s clear the fish go in to hiding and often it’s only at dusk where they let their guard down and start to look for food.

But as us anglers know, after a bit of rain, a tinge of colour, that net curtain over the window they can go about their business without looking over their shoulder all the time.

Oddly the Zander are nowhere to be seen on this stretch and yet especially upstream the swims look ideal, the deeper sonar ticking the box. I should fish it in to dark more to be honest as I’m sure there are some surprises to be had, maybe I will. There are certainly good Chub here and fish lamprey at dusk I’m sure if a Zander isn’t around, a good Chub will be.

Only a quick morning session this, a break from Fortnite, a break for his mother….

It was Sam’s choice as well, “I want to catch a jack pike Daddy”

So tackle in the car the night before, a quick smash and grab session !!!!

The river was up but and some nice colour but the small fish were hard to come by, after what seemed like an hour Sam caught his first fish, a small roach, then luckily the sport picked up, the wind was cold you see and he was beginning to lose the will to live.

A bit like me and the Pike, the last one pictured right caught a few days ago after quite a baron time of late.

A lamprey eventually was taken my a Jack and a livebait under a float in quite a few swims weirdly went unnoticed. Usually this small section it's a livebait that attracts the Pike, much more than the deadbaits which I've found the opposite on other areas.

So another poor session, the Pike seem to be sulking at the minute. I've another couple of sessions planned soon though, the next one, a short after work session. I'm hoping the carpet bombing approach will eventually throw something nice up.

Warwickshire Avon – Smelt and Snot Rockets Pt.4

A woman rang the BBC and said she heard a hurricane on the way and so began the most infamous weather bulletin in British history on the lunchtime news over 30 years ago now.

“Well I can assure people watching,” smirked weather forecaster Michael Fish, “don’t worry, there isn’t.”

Just a few hours following that fateful broadcast in the early hours of October 16, 1987, the south coast of England was battered by the greatest storm witnessed in nearly three centuries. Gales reaching 115mph caused utter devastation across the southern half of the country, leaving 18 people dead, 15 million trees flattened, and a repair bill totalling £2bn.

From Hero to Zero sadly because good old Mr Fish a previously benign national presence in chequered two-piece suits of varying shades of beige, the Great Storm led to him being lampooned in the press.

Not as a harbinger of doom, but rather somebody who failed to see it galloping across the Channel towards us.

Nowadays, the weatherman seems to secretly revel in the notoriety, a clip of the fateful broadcast was, to his great delight, used in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games. But at the same time he is eager to clear his name, and shift the blame.

Now obviously he was only relaying what those further up the chain of command were telling him, and the real villain of piece was the met office computer that got it so wrong.

The Met Office computer on which Fish and his colleagues relied in 1987 made four million calculations a second. Nowadays it is capable of 14,000 trillion calculations a second. Most of these come from satellites which were rarely used 30 years ago.

As a direct result of the Great Storm, deep ocean weather buoys were located around the British Isles to provide hourly weather information and help us to monitor developing weather conditions. Where grid squares of 150km were once used for weather prediction, now the range is 10km.

In order to demonstrate these advances, a couple of years ago the Met Office announced that it had rerun the conditions in 1987 to determine whether its new supercomputer would have made the correct forecast and proudly claimed it spotted the weather system forming up to a week ahead.

What a load of boll*cks

Anyone noticed that the weather since that faithful day is often predicted to be far worse than it actually is and when the weather front passes by like a rather large damp squib they don’t admit that they over egged it.

They cannot seem to predict what the weather will 24 hours before despite all the computer power they are shouting from the rooftops about. Here’s an idea, use my method, seems to work quite well, pop your head out of the window, look up for a few seconds and at the same time put your wetted finger in the air.

Then decide what to wear, works for me….

So anyway for this session and Nic I would be fishing the private stretch to try and winkle out a predator or two. If you looked at the weather throughout the week, and even a few hours before we’d be battling gale force winds and rain to fill empty bird baths, but as expected that didn’t quite happen as predicted.

3.30ish till well in to dark, ideal to try and winkle out a Zander or maybe even a Pike. The water had a nice tinge of colour last time I fished the Avon and the bites came thick and fast, I was hoping this stretch being much further downstream would be on the same timetable.

Two rods for me, lamprey on one, smelt on the other.

So after a lunch with the Wife I headed over to Nic's stretch and he was already there setting up. It was windy but perfectly fishable, the water temperature 7.3 degrees if I recall.

The rain held off till we decided to call it a day, typical, The session was an uneventful one sadly.

Despite all the baits out, a swim that has produced some decent fish, I had a couple of rod tip pulls on Lamprey and Nic had a 10 yard run on a oil injected Roach without hooking up, It was a blank, and we fished well in to dark as well. Hmmmm, not good, one of those session we'd both like to forget. Sadly Nic's lazer cut fabricated Zed monkey climbers didn't get a good outing.

Odd session, very odd !!!!