Barbel forays and more commercial perch

On Sunday I conceded and spent the four hours that I suddenly found that I had free barbelling on the River Soar. The temperature was well up and the river was just about within it's banks, so I was told, plus I couldn't think of anything else to do at short notice so I went for it. Pulling up at the road side I looked across towards the river beyond the lake that the field had become and it looked like I could make it to the bank, Once I'd got within twenty yards of the lake I started to have my doubts but I found a fairly narrow crossing point that just about failed to swamp my boots at full tip toe.

Just about within its banks

 Starting at the top of the stretch I worked my way through a swim an hour most of which required five ounces of lead to hold steady, but of the whiskered ones there was not a sign. What I did see though were some tracks running along the bank in the freshly deposited silt. It would be very unusual for a dog to be in the area and I suspected that it was an otter which I confirmed when I compared them to some pictures on the internet. Sightings are now being reported on a very regular basis on most of the stretches of river, only time will tell what impact they will have.

It looked the part

The far bank snags looked a bit iffy!

The warm spell continued into the week inspired I was not but eventually the need to fish persuaded me to visit another commercial fishery to try for a perch or two. This particular fishery had been kind to me in the past and in fact was where I had caught my biggest stripey to date at 3lb 11oz's several years previously on a day which had given me another three captures in excess of 3lb's, I say captures and not perch as one of them visited me twice in the space of half an hour or so.

Was this fella still there?

I arrived at dawn to find the place empty which was not unexpected to be honest seeing as it was midweek after a holiday. My mate Rob would be joining me later but until then I had solitude which was some compensation seeing that the water isn't what I would call scenic, more functional in the normal fashion of this type of fishery. I started off on the windward bank and float fished a prawn down the edge in four feet of water over a bed of chopped prawn and maggot. After an hour and a half I got wander lust and wound in to have a look at a swim in the opposite corner that covered the largest reedbed on the water, it certainly looked good. As I was debating the move Rob pulled up behind me and after five minutes of chatting I had convinced myself that it was the place to be, Rob was going to drop in further along the bank towards where I had started.

Once I had got myself reorganised and had plumbed the depth in my new swim I started to feed a pinch of maggots every few minutes along the reed lined margin while I set up another rod with a live bait rig. Within twenty minutes I had the odd fish boiling sub surface, this was starting to look good. I decided to give it half an hour on the prawn before trying to catch some bait but that didn't produce any positive bites so it was time to get the maggot on. Straight away it was a bite a chuck, a couple of micro perch first, then a 6oz roach that I returned as being a bit big for what I wanted, then a small carp of some description, possibly one of those F1 hybrid type things, it certainly didn't look quite like a true carp anyway. The bites kept coming but very few were from my perfect bait sized fish. Eventually I had three small roach in the net and gave up at that, I stuck a prawn back on the float rig after I had swung out the paternostered roach on the other rod.

This time the prawn was getting more attention, mostly nibbles from small fish but I had two more small carp and a bream of about 2lb's, no sign of the decent perch at all. A shout from down the bank told me that Rob was getting a similiar result, he'd just been given the run around by a carp of 3 or 4lb's. I gave the lure's a go for an hour before dusk and thought I felt one possible hit but it could have just been debris. The method was very productive on the water previously and I was starting to think that maybe there was no longer a head of larger perch present. I don't plan to return any time soon to try and find out to be honest, it was a days fishing and it was nice to get a few bites in these hard times but I do find many of these commercials to be soulless places especially in the depths of winter.

I needed to get back on the rivers, levels were almost back to normal on the Soar and with the weather being incredibly warm for the season I decided on another barbel trip. The stretch that I had in mind had been difficult to get to for quite a while due to the floods and I wasn't certain that I would be able to park in the usual area, there is a layby that can be used but memories of broken windows from years gone by puts me off of that one if at all possible. I drove slowly across the first field avoiding the main ruts and it was looking good, then I saw a very soggy looking patch of grass ahead and no way was I going to risk that so I swung the motor off into the rough grass and carried on towards the second field. Within a hundred yards I could see that I wasn't going to make it and decided to park where I was and carry on by foot, the field was a mass of mud made worse by a heavy vehicle of some sort that had been through making walking tricky and driving suicidal.

As I suspected the banks hadn't seen much traffic since the flood had receded and as I also suspected the going was tough, it was slippery as hell and great clods of mud stuck to my boots making every step hard work. I started off in my old faithful spot which was looking in great condition with the floods having pushed away a lot of debris while also scouring away the river bed to create what will be an excellent sight fishing spot next summer. if we get a summer that is.

Thoughts of summer stalking came to mind

Two rigs went out complete with pva sticks of small pellets and crumbed boilie, a spicy tuna boilie being on each hair. After an hour or so the downstream rod banged over a couple of times, no doubt due to a chub attack, but other that that it seemed strangely dead. I stuck it out for three hours which is much longer than I would normally stop in a swim on the Soar but I was confident that barbel weren't far off, eventually though I knew that I had to move.

I walked another three hundred yards downstream to an area that I've never caught a barbel from which is a strange choice maybe but I know that they do turn up there at times and the more I blank the more I want to catch one from the spot. Again I only made one cast per rod and just with a small pva stick for a bit of extra attraction, despite it looking good for a bite the last swim had proved that the barbel weren't ready to crawl up the bank so there was no point in going over the top on the bait front. I sat down and surveyed the huge amount of debris deposited in every bush and tree by the high water, almost entirely plastic of some description and the vast majority of it will still be there for months to come. Even if the rubbish does get dislodged the problem will only be elsewhere, many plastics take an eternity to degrade and even if they do so they release toxic elements into the environment. It's a sobering thought to consider that we have only relatively recently been producing these materials, what kind of state will we be in another few hundred years?

Rubbish,  that just about summed the day up

I was shaken out of my thoughts by a swirl mid river and twenty yards downstream that caught my eye. I stood looking directly at the spot and suddenly there was another swirl that developed into a bow wave that travelled for a few yards before disapearing, then two more big swirls heading into the near bank. That didn't look like any kind of fish to me, the nature of the bank stopped me from seeing any further along the bank and no other activity was seen, was it another sign of an otter? Whatever it was it was the most excitement that occured all day, it seemed so right but it obviously wasn't.

On the way back to the van I stopped to check the permits of two anglers piking. They too had struggled with only one jack between them when they would normally expect more, it's a funny old game this fishing lark. Talking about it later someone remarked that the day in general had seemed strange with hardly any bird life about and when I came to think of it he was right. No matter what we think we know there will always be a lot that we don't understand, it makes things so much more interesting, and frustrating.

Small stream chub fishing

Well what a year it has been weather wise, when you think that it couldn't possibly rain any more it comes again with a vengeance and the ground is so saturated that even a small amount of the wet stuff finds its way into the rivers in an instant. I had finally sorted myself out with a new van on Saturday and was raring to get back at those river perch but there wasn't a cat in hells chance. The rivers looked awful and every time a glimmer of hope shone in my direction another cloud drifted across and blotted it out.

I was getting seriously fed up, without my fix of angling I get tetchy and restless, something had to be done. My stillwater options were limited to two venues that I wanted to fish, one has only just returned to lake status after being joined to the Trent, the other is chocolate brown from the massive influx of water, I fancied my chances on neither. Then a thought occured to me, why not have a go on the brook that runs through my village, I had fished it a couple of time previously and for such a tiny watercourse it held some nice fish, nothing of specimen proportions but nevertheless great fun and something very different.

The brook flows through a reservoir before meandering along the fields and beside a housing estate then back out into farm land as it heads towards the nearby town. There was always a population of small rainbow trout present when we were kids, no doubt from the reservoir though I've not seen any in recent years I should imagine they are still about. There are certainly some lovely little brownies though and I caught one of a pound and a quarter a couple of years back. The same day I located a shoal of perfectly conditioned roach in a tiny pool between fast runs and took fish to almost 8oz's though a mink kept popping his head up from amongst a pile of wood on the far bank and I feared for their well being. Fishable spots are few and far between, most of it's length is fast  and turbulent and so narrow as to be jumpable in places. A conventional rod would limit those fishable spots even more due to the bankside foliage and so I dug out an ancient Silstar match picker tip rod, at only 6ft in length I could poke it in to the smallest of gaps.

My first port of call was the pool that had given me those roach previously. The approach across the fields was waterlogged and as I neared the bank the amount of debris that had been shifted in the flood was incredible. Great piles of sand had been deposited in places, obviously scoured from the stream bed, and foot thick rafts of crop stubble lay in curved banks where the water and driven it. The water was still well up and quite coloured but I still rated it as good for a roach or two. The pool in question is I would guess twenty feet across at its widest point and is formed by a bend where the full force of the flow pounding into the far bank has eroded it over the years. This has created a fish holding spot on a stretch that is so shallow for several hundred yards both up and downstream that only the smallest of trout, maybe sticklebacks and the odd bullhead could survive. With the increased flow the majority of the swim resembled a washing machine but a back eddy on the inside of the bend right under my feet looked to have potential and I flicked a few bits of bread flake down the edge before setting up the rod with a simple link ledger rig. The piece of fishable water was at the very most eight feet long by a couple of feet wide and I gradually covered the entire area over the course of a dozen or so casts without an indication from anything other than a considerable amount of debris that was being circulated in the eddy. If the roach were there I would have expected a bite quickly and I couldn't imagine anywhere else in the swim that they could be sitting until I spotted a piece of slack water tight in to the far bank, totally unfishable from my bank but certainly big enough to hold fish. I decided that it was time to move on and I hoped that the roach were still there and didn't get wiped out by the mink between my visits, I will go back for another go soon so we shall see.

The next fishable spot that I remembered was another three or four hundred yards downstream but I followed the course of the brook anyway just in case the flood had created a new area, nothing was quite fishable as yet but a couple of bits had future potential. The swim I had in mind was a U bend which sooner or later will cut through to create an oxbow. The last time I had fished it I had sat at the upstream end of the curve but the flow was too powerful on this occasion, the point where the bend began to open up was perfect though and would let me fish upstream into a nice steady run. I mashed up a slice of bread and fed it into the fast water to allow the flow to send it into the potential fish holding areas below before settling down in my little nook, possibly a spot never before fished and it isn't often you can say that is it.

I flicked the two swan shot link the required few yards and took the slack out of the line allowing the tip to find it's own curve. If the opportunity presents itself I will always choose to fish an upstream ledger, it offers much less resistance to a biting fish and the bites are normally much easier to hit. Within thirty seconds of the rig settling the method proved itself as two small taps were followed by the tip springing straight and I almost rolled over backwards as I tried to pick up the line with the tiny rod, maybe I should take the eight footer next time. With a rod designed for scratching small fish out of canals the fight from anything even half decent was always going to be fun and the chub of not much more than a pound had it hooped over double as I attempted to keep it from burying itself amongst the nearside foliage.

I would normally return the fish some distance away to save spooking any others in the swim but finding somewhere suitable would have meant a long walk so I had no choice but to slip it straight back. Mind you that didn't seem to make too much difference as after throwing in some more free offerings upstream the next cast produced an identical bite instantly. This fish ran towards me so quickly that I had to wind down before I could bend in to it right under my feet where it gave me a right old run around before I scooped it up, a bit bigger this time at pushing two pounds I suppose. I thought the chances of another bite after that were pretty slim but that wasn't going to stop me trying. I was right in my thoughts though not for the reason I had in mind as just after I had plopped the rig out the far bank collapsed with a mighty crash destroying any hope of a bite, I didn't see that coming!

I decided to call it a day at that point quite happy at having had a couple of fish and knowing that the next promising area was probably a mile distant. I squelched my way back along the hedgerow accompanied by a flock of Redwings leapfrogging ahead of me making the most of the berries and turning my thoughts to what might lie ahgead weather wise. Cold to any extreme I can cope with, so long as the rivers keep flowing and I can get to them I am confident in catching fish, rain however I have seen quite enough of for one year thank you very much.