After seriously injuring my hands in 1992 my winter chub fishing on rivers effectively came to an end. Whilst I could still fish, cooler weather tended to make my hands painful. As a result I found it difficult to strike and play fish and on the few occasions I did fish my hands were very painful for days afterwards. I have always been an optimist but having spoken at length with my specialist I expected to be stuck with the problem for life. However, things were to take an unexpected turn for the better. In October2001 I gave up smoking after 22 years of 20 a day and a year later I started to notice significant improvements in my hands. By January 2003 I had improved enough to consider a serious back-end campaign on the rivers for chub for the first time in 11 years. Walker’s stretch and a bigger river My second venue was to be a stretch of river that I had fished numerous times over the years for chub but which, because of my hands, I had been unable to fish as much as I would have liked. A much bigger ‘southern river’ it is at the moment on the circuit and has received more than its fair share of publicity. Fortunately the size of the river and the fact that a lot of anglers have found it difficult to get to grips with have meant that the numbers fishing the venue have stayed relatively low. The stretch has few obvious features, with most of the water being fairly open and with a hard gravel bottom. The huge advantage with this stretch was that I could now get a ticket to night-fish the opposite bank to that which I had previously been fishing and thus avoid the rather ‘eccentric’ souls who tend to frequent the place. I decided to start off at Walker’s stretch, fishing short sessions covering the period before and after sunset. My plan was to fish very short sessions but to fish as often as possible. I had fished Walker’s a couple of times over the previous month, roving the entire stretch to checkout all of the swims. In that time I had bumped into a couple of anglers who I knew of old from Tring and they had been helpful in updating me on swims to fish and baits to use. Dubious about the ‘going’ methods and baits I was told, and my observations bore this out, that there was a series of swims that produced little and which most anglers by-passed as they roved the stretch. The favoured bait appeared to be yellow, garlic flavoured, cheese paste. The method most were adopting, was to bait a number of swims and then return to the first after twenty minutes and then fish each in turn for a short period of time. Only when it was really cold or raining did anglers seem to stick in one swim for any length of time. Plan of attack and a first encounter with a clonker The first few sessions brought me numerous fish to 4lb 14oz from the un-rated swims and then on my fourth session I hooked a clonker next to a fallen willow, which managed to break me after a five-minute fight. I saw the fish roll just beneath the surface immediately before the line broke on a branch of the willow and it was clearly a fish in excess of six pounds. The next day saw me in the tackle shop recounting my tale of woe as I purchased a spool of 7.9 lb bs Silstar Match for my return to Walker’s stretch that afternoon. Both Charlie the owner and a regular named Morris appeared a little sceptical of my estimate of the size of the fish at well over 6lb from just one glance. There was a brolly in the swim There was one angler on the whole stretch and he was fishing just where I wanted to be. I stopped and had a chat with the bloke who, like most anglers you meet on the Ouse, was very friendly. Apparently he had had nothing and he informed me that he had only dropped into the swim because he couldn’t put his umbrella up there without it getting blown about by the wind. His approach contrasted with my own which is if you don’t take a brolly or a chair then you will fish where you should fish and not where it is comfortable. I decided to fish the swims below him and possibly move back up to the fallen willow if the bloke had left before sunset, which I thought he might since I had ‘forgotten’ to mention the fish I had lost the previous day. The next swim about 80 yards downstream was completely different with a sharp bend in the river. There was a lot of deposited gravel on the inside of the bend and on this particular day, with the level falling, a back eddy against the far bank just off the fast flowing water through the main part of the bend had formed. I threw in three small pieces of cheese paste and followed them up with my bait. Within five minutes I had landed a nice chub of about 3 1/2 lb that gave a good account of itself in the fast water. I had not yet fished the next swim that again was also on a bend with two willows on the far bank. The flow on the day meant that there was a small back-eddy immediately in front of the downstream willow. To fish it with a small weight I would have to cast the bait so that it hit the trunk of the willow and dropped into the eddy, and then have the rod very high to keep the line clear of the fast water. I threw in five small pieces of cheese paste, added a swan shot to the two already on my link and moulded a medium sized piece of cheese paste round my size 6 Drennan Carbon Specimen. The first cast hit the trunk as planned and dropped into the eddy, but after two minutes the line was caught by the flow and dislodged the bait. I recast and carefully put the rod on the rest (I still am unable to hold a rod for any length of time). The tip twitched and then….a new PB! She was massive, with a length of 23 inches, and weighing 6lb 9oz, making her my new PB. I placed her in a sack so that I could pop upstream and get the angler in the fallen willow swim to do the honours with the camera. As I got back to the top of the bank I saw him in the distance walking across the field to his car. I shouted but he was too far away and didn’t hear me, which was a shame. Personally, the next best thing to catching a big fish for me is to see one in the flesh. Photographs are simply a way of triggering pleasant memories and of course a good way to motivate you on a cold, wet, windy night to get out there and do it. After photographing the fish and putting her back I moved up to the fallen willow and spent sunset and the next hour fishing the swim without any success. Then next day I popped back into the tackle shop to show Charlie and as luck would have it Morris was in too. I placed a photo of my chub on the counter and said nothing. Charlie looked at it and smiled, “Look at what the Dog’s gone and had Morris,” he said.
That evening again saw me on the river and with no other anglers on the fishery I decided to fish the three swims I’d fished the day before. In the first I had no bites but in the Willows swim I had an immediate bite and landed a small chub of about 21/2 lb before moving up to the Fallen Willow swim. My PB had grown in more ways than one When I opened the net I was stunned to find it was the same fish as the big one from the day before. I weighed her again and she had put on 3oz since I had caught her 25 hours earlier. Taking another set of photographs seemed strange but I felt I needed to since she was now my PB at 6lb 12oz. For the next couple of weeks I avoided the swim, taking quite a few fish from a lot of different swims but nothing over 4lbs. Then, one afternoon, with the temperature falling and a biting wind and hail, I dropped into the swim once again to fish the hour after sunset. As I was sitting on the ground in the middle of a ferocious hailstorm with no brolly and no chair my mobile rang. My mate Brian was on the other end of the phone and said I must be mad fishing in what were truly atrocious conditions. Half an hour later I phoned him on my way back to the car to tell him that I’d just put back a lovely fish of 5lb 15oz. The next couple of sessions saw a lot more people on the bank and I decided to change venues and spend some time on the southern river. Next week in Part 2, Andy gets to grips with the chub in the bigger southern river, finding the crayfish an ally rather than a nuisance |
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