Warwickshire Stour - Rhypophagy and Rhinotillexomania

As a solitude seeker especially in these 'testing' times there is nothing more therapeutic for ones mind than small river chub fishing. Now the Avon was still chocolate brown and bombing through but a quick check of the levels the Stour was very much fishable.

Recently Nic had managed to catch a lovely roach well over the pound from the stretch we both had been fishing and for this 3.5 hour short dawn morning session a roach of that stamp would be nice.

Now the Stour is very much the same as it winds itself through open countryside but the river can vary so much in depth, width and features along its journey to where it exits at the Warwickshire Avon.

The colour is often a lovely green colour and it hardly changes from this despite floods or droughts. I'm sure the fish feel confident because of this and bites can be forthcoming due to the clarity. It was up quite a bit when I fished it last but still well within the banks and plenty of fishable swims.

Despite the air temperature being 10 degrees the wind was bitter and was playing havoc with the light quiver top. Trotting might have been the better option but even that might have only been possible in handful of swims along the stretch.

Like any small river, fish show them shows quite quickly if the bait is presented well and I alternated between bread and worm and got plenty of bites. Not the biggest of fish admittedly but bites are bites and its surprising just how little you think about in these sort of sessions, and the wellbeing is boosted because of that.  

I started at the bottom of the stretch and made my way up and dropped in to every likely looking swim. Here the fish are a smaller stamp as the bottom end and larger at the top. I'm not sure why that is to be honest, but it appears that way from my findings. 

The bigger chub were nowhere to be seen half way in to the session and after spending nearly an hour in the swim Nic caught the decent roach, I had an hour left to try and catch a proper rod puller.

A snaggy swim with a slack provided a bite really quick but I lost the fish nearing the net and it felt a proper chub that reside here. Usually if you lose a fish that way you won't get another bite so I was surprised when another fish fell to to the bread disk within 5 minutes of getting the bait out again.

Bread seemed to out-fish the worm so I stuck to the white stuff for the second half of the session. Not the biggest of Chub at 2 1/4 lb but lots of fun on light tackle I use for this sort of river.

No more fish from that swim so I walked back to the very upstream part of the stretch where its a little more overgrown to see if the bigger chub wanted cover over their heads but despite looking like it would produce a bite, neither of the two swims I tried  did sadly.

The banks are slippy at the minute and after a misplaced foot on the slippy mud I went a cropper with all my tackle and fell right on my side !!! luckily no damage done but with the session almost over anyway, I made haste before any other misfortune with damaged pride and a wet net.

I didn't stumble upon my lost scales but luckily I managed to buy another set for a tenner from Ebay including the p&p, they are in better nick than the last ones, so after kicking myself after I lost them, the boy done good. 

Warwickshire Avon - Hot Fish and Honorificabilitudinity

With the early afternoon spent taking the Christmas decorations down and dry January in full swing the football wasn't really doing it for me, so I grabbed some tackle together and headed down to the Warwickshire Avon for a last minute Barbus.

The river was on the up again which wasn't ideal and the little brook on-route was showing the effects of the recent rain. Where had the time gone ? the extra long break has come round far too fast, at least I've been out a few times 💪

Barbel don't mind a river in flood, in-fact I often only target them in these conditions especially when the weather is mild like it is at the moment. A change is on the way though as the temperature is going to drop to that more suited to the winter season. 

If I didn't get out for this session I'd miss an opportunity to try and winkle one out. I'm in two-minds whether to renew this book and some big decisions need to be made for the new season. It is very convenient being only 10 minutes away by car but the barbel numbers have been on the decline and to be honest thats one of the reasons why I fished this stretch.

I'm not one to sit behind motionless rods and that's what has been happening more often than not over the last couple of years. I used to be able to rock up straight after work an hour before dusk and 8 times out of 10 as soon as the light went, more often than not a barbel would provide that 3 foot twitch.

When it was up and coloured multiple fish captures were a possibility when I first became a member and this stretch is home to my 12lb 14oz PB and quite a few doubles. But it's not just me that if finding it difficult of late, maybe members I bump in to are saying the same thing. I have noticed outside of the matches that the banks of have been quiet, very quiet and there is a good reason for that.

For this 2 hour session I roved around the middle of the stretch where one of the bailiffs had said the other fish had popped up recently and as expected had it all to myself. 

2 swims down without even a nibble I alternated between Dynamite Hot Fish boilies, matching paste and also lobworm. Each cast also had a PVA bag of stinky pellets to try and get any fish in the area out to come up to the bait. The river despite rising looked in decent fettle and was a tropical 10.7 degrees. It had dropped quite a bit of the last couple of days and the fish should have been used to it now.

The brook in the first picture enters the river around here and it had really coloured up the water so the last peg I fish in to dusk was upstream of this. There was an overhanging tree to the left and out in-front, decent depth and a gravel bottom and a lovely smooth uninterrupted flow, it screamed a Barbel, it really did.

I've caught some nice fish in this area in the past and some big chub too but dusk came and went without even a chub pull, so to be honest the curfew this stretch has couldn't round quick enough, another Barbel blank to add the many I've had here now.

Small Brook Fishing Pt.20 - Crepehangers and Currycombs

Sam wanted a fishing fix for this first session of 2022 and I asked him what he wanted to try and catch and he said.

"Bullhead, I want to catch a bullhead"

The problem is our bullhead banker swim isn't available to us anymore however we have caught them from other areas of this forgotten stream which is one of the cleanest stretches of river I fish when the river is at normal levels. When this brook is well up obviously the banks turn it from gin clear to chocolate. 

Now in pre-industrial days before the evils of pollution and abstraction began to affect our waterways, innumerable small rivers and streams provided fine trout and coarse fishing. Even in the comparatively recent pre-war days, many streams were unaffected by pollution, their waters running clear and sweet over beds of sand and gravel. 

And most of them held fish even the tiny, shallow streams that ran close to a motorway or through a town. 

Today, alas, the picture is very different. Many such streams have fallen victim to what we call industrial 'progress', poisoned by effluents or seeping sewage. 

Others have been allowed to become completely overgrown, or silted up, and are no longer fishable. 

This is not only a loss which the countryside as a whole can ill-afford but also short-sightedness on the part of many landowners to whom a properly-managed stream could provide a useful source of additional income, as well as pleasure to many local anglers. 

Nowadays, every mile of fishable water is in demand from an ever increasing number of anglers, and many clubs are willing to pay high prices for the privilege of fishing in a few miles of a stream or small river. 

No matter how small or insignificant a stream may appear, or how overgrown it has become, it can in many cases be made to pay its way. 

If it already contains fish, the landowner has only to ensure that it is kept clean and, if necessary, made fishable by the judicious cutting back of encroaching vegetation. 

If there are no fish in the stream, it can be stocked with either trout or coarse fish, or even with both provided it is not polluted. 

This might mean additional work and some outlay of capital, but it is surely better to invest in improvements of this nature than to allow the stream to become neglected, or even worse, to have it dredged and made into a straight, featureless, ditch containing no fish at all. 

Its surprising just how fast the levels falls and the clarity improves so to be honest it wasn't perfect conditions for brook fishing but the first swim brought a couple of trout, dace and roach we knew it would be an ok morning, well before the rain started to tank down that is.

Still Sam and I love this sort of fishing and we decided to start in a familiar area and then go off the beaten track a little to see if we were missing out on another area we could try.

To be honest it was much of a muchness but its quite an eyeopener on how many fish are in this waterway and how quickly they find the bait.

I find it best to fish it when the levels are high because when its low you need to find the deeper swims and they are few and far between. In summer it is barely a trickle, in winter the anglers fortunes change. 

The usual worm tipped with a maggot approach was swapped for a couple of red maggots and to be honest it didn't make much of a difference in bites. We wanted to try and catch a bullhead though so the size 12 hook was swapped for a size 18. 

After a few missed bites the fish were queuing up for the grubs and every swim we fish produced bites. One swim produced a varied quarry, one just roach and then another only bold biting minnows. Luckily plenty of fish were caught before the rain started to tank down and we made a swift retreat. Only a smash and grab session, but another enjoyable one, we'll be back.