Having decided to try my new secret bait I felt I ought to do things properly, so I arrived at the water by about 5.00pm and left myself plenty of time to get settled and bait up with loose offerings. Once again the river has changed out of all recognition from last season. Club members have been down here already, cutting paths down to the water and making various swims safe - last season you had a choice of one and if someone was in it, you might as well have gone home. Or stayed to watch them fish.
This year we're blessed and I feel a barbel is going to come out this year for me...possibly on the secret bait.
But not this night. This night was for chub and luncheon meat (which, ever the coward, I switched to after I couldn't buy a bite on the SB). It was nice Old Oak stuff that smelled lovely. I almost ate it myself.
The chub enjoyed themselves and I caught five in about five hours, between one and a half and four pounds. Didn't photograph any of them though - nor the little pike that snatched the meat as I reeled in at about 9.00pm. He gave me a good fight though, before those fangs sliced through the line and the ledger pinged up into the tree behind me.
The river looked beautiful, just beautiful.
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I'm absolutely certain there's a barbel with your name on it in there. I dropped in for a couple of hours last night to give my new rod its first outing - I arrived at about 6 to find a very low river and, as you say, a radically different swim from the one we fished last season.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't terribly optimistic, to say the least, but I had a chub almost immediately, followed by a couple of bloody great eels; they really seemed to like the pellets, so I switched to my own SB, not quite as exotic as yours but which certainly did the job. At exactly 8pm I had the standard humungous bite which resulted in barbel of about 5lb, a beautiful fin-perfect fish; and 20 minutes later, this feller grabbed my SB with some vigour. I'll spare you the details of the battle, but suffice to say that I was shaking (not to mention perspiring) at the end of it. I grinned like a madman all the way back to the car - I think the late-evening strollers on Ripley Common thought I was some kind of maniac. Which, perhaps, I was...
S.
Wow. I've only just seen this. That's a real fish.
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