Warwickshire Avon - Voyeurs and Volumenometers

It may seem I fish a lot looking at this blog, but the reality is my sessions are often short ie 2-4 hours, with 5 hours at a push. Little and often works for me because to be honest I struggle to sit behind motionless rods waiting for that bite which some sessions dictate. 

Fishing at the right time and the right conditions for a particular species can often pay dividends and arrive a couple of hours before dusk like I did for this session, you're often in prime bite time. Those that say they haven't time for fishing, have a word with yourselves !! for me I need that fishing fix to keep on the straight and narrow. 

I'd not fished this club water, well in this area anyway for a good while but it's usually good for a bite so I wanted to see what I'd been missing if anything ? A couple of anglers were just leaving as I arrived and I don't think they did any good, well they certainly were not forthcoming with any information !!

Unlike my old house in Birmingham thankfully no blatant exhibitionists to be seen here !!, just some nice fish to catch, as fishing opposite houses is not ideal as your effectively looking in peoples windows. The fish seem to like it here however and I've caught plenty of barbel in years gone by here.  😁. They are the odd one or two flitting about but they are certainly not in the numbers 'barbel alley' once had.

A proper lovely sunny day again it was too, so I was surprised after setting my stall out and pinging in a few pellets with a couple of pellets on the hair I had my first chub pull. I thought that would materialise into a fish eventually but didn't until I changed to a boilie and a paste wrap which was nailed by a fish after a few minutes of being out. That was quick !!, maybe they had been on the Carling. 

I knew it was a chub and a decent one too but it was soon in the landing net using the 1.75TC Harrison Barbel rod. A lovely really stocky fish of 4lb and 7 ounces around 15 minutes of getting there. Happy with that !!!

I got the rod back out after returning the fish upstream and again after pinging in some pellets the rod top was starting to nod with another bite. I struck in to another solid fish, this one taking some line and giving me the run around. Another chub, this one far bigger than the first fish and went 5lb and 8 ounces on the scales. 

This one built like a brick out house, not far off 60cm's in length and felt a decent fish as soon as I lifted the landing net. It felt cold when the sun disappeared and dusk came and oddly apart from a few more sharp twang's on the rod top, that 3 foot twitch never materialised. 

Curfew had arrived and I'm sure I'd catch another chub if rules were not an issue, but to be honest with around 2 hours fishing I was happy with that. The chub seems to have a different statue down this neck of the woods, however because there is regular matches on here they do see more bait that than the stretches I usually fish.

I was in two mind to renew this book in the new season as I've only fished it a handful of times, but it could be getting back to some form and it's Soooo convenient and so much to go at it would be stupid not to really. It's certainly on my radar again anyway, happy days !!. 

Warwickshire Avon - The Untrodden Pt.21

A dawn roving session, two missed bites in the same swim where on the second missed bite, the hook comes back with a rather large scale. Damn It !!!

Still the sun came out and stayed out, and despite the lack of action I stayed till curfew time because it was just sooooooooooooo nice out there. Kites and Kingfishers and Kangaroo's (ok maybe the latter was an exaggeration), heck even the noisy planes stayed away for this session where I finished up at 11.00am.

It's just nice to be out sometime isn't it, from a misty frosty start to full on blue skies and sun. It felt great just to be alive !!!

Shame the fish didn't play ball !!!

Small Brook Fishing Pt.27 - Fiends and Fiddle-faddle

In fishing small running waters there is no room for the man who wants to perch himself on his basket for hours on end. It is mostly a moving pastime and one which calls for more versatility, combined with watercraft, than any other form of angling.

Once the technique is mastered the continual surprises in size, quantity and variety of catches cause one to wonder why we ever bother to fish in more popular waters, almost rubbing shoulders with our companions.

Millions of words have been written about freshwater fishing, in fact so many that it hardly seems possible that enough new information could be gathered together to produce yet another book. Despite this tremendous amount of literature it seems to me that one field (and a very special one) has not yet been covered, namely that of angling on small running waters.

With the ever increasing population of anglers, and the continual struggle for more waters, fishermen are beginning to turn their attention to waters which, a few years ago, they would have overlooked as not being worthwhile. 

Disused gravel pits, derelict canals and even farm ponds which were spurned as being not worth fishing, are being sought out and fished, and many surprises have been revealed both in the number and quality of the fish in many of these neglected places. On these waters some anglers prove more successful than others. Each water needs a different technique and the more adaptable angler is usually the more efficient. 

Amongst game fishermen there is an old saying that trout like the sun on their backs. There was never anything more true and the same maxim applies equally to coarse fish. In daylight hours during the summer months fish generally spend more time in shallow water, when they are not disturbed, than in the deeps. 

For one thing it is warmer there and usually the shallows are richer in both oxygen and plant life, the latter harbouring live food upon which the fish like to feed. They can be caught there provided the angler does nothing to alarm them.

Once the fish are located the first essential is not to scare them. This rule has been stressed time and time again by anglers far more experienced than myself, and yet from what I see each time I go fishing there is still plenty of room for repetition.

Particularly on small running waters, which are often both clear and shallow, the approach is the deciding factor between a good bag or no fish at all. A clumsy approach sends the fish in panic stricken flight, either upstream or down, and once thus alarmed they take quite a time to settle down and recommence feeding.

Now anglers often travel up to two hundred miles on a round trip for their day's sport and frequently return home shaking their heads, saying that fishing is not what it was and murmuring about pollution. We anglers are a strange race. 'We search the country wide for our fishing, but we are wont to overlook the abundance on our doorstep.'

I can only hope that this blog of mine encourages some of you to 'look around the corner' and try your hand on the small running waters on your doorstep. Anyway to the fishing, well a hard frost overnight I didn't think much would be biting on the bigger rivers so with a pint of maggots to the little stream it was.

I'd seen a couple of otters on here not long back so wanted to give it a go because the adjacent canal wasn't frozen as it was last time I set foot here. After retracing my steps to find the end of my drennan specialist landing net handle after the locking bush wouldn't lock, I finally got fishing.

I fished a handful of swims trotting maggots and only one swim produced any bites and they were dace thankfully where this one pictured was the biggest. Not a huge dace for this stretch but at least they can talk about the visit to their mates by the furry fiends.

I managed two more smaller dace and that was it. I'm sure the hard frost overnight didn't help as I suspect the fish might well be shoaled up somewhere. Oddly though the deeper swims didn't hold any fish, and the swim I caught the fish in was quite shallow and pacey, not what I expected anyway.