Wintle’s World – Memorable Matches Part 2

Mark Wintle, an angler for thirty-five years, is on a quest to discover and bring to you the magic of fishing. Previously heavily involved with match fishing he now fishes for the sheer fun of it. With an open and enquiring mind, each week Mark will bring to you articles on fishing different rivers, different methods and what makes rivers, and occasionally stillwaters, tick. Add to this a mixed bag of articles on catching big fish; tackle design, angling politics and a few surprises.

Are you stuck in a rut fishing the same swim every week? Do you dare to try something different and see a whole new world of angling open up? Yes? Then read Mark Wintle’s regular column.

Wintle’s World of Angling – Memorable Matches Part 2 – Stour Chub

MY EARLY MATCH forays on the Dorset Stour in the early to mid seventies involved dace, roach, gudgeon, bleak and perch. As a Dorset Frome (a chubless river) angler, I had very little experience of catching chub. In the years that followed I learnt some tricks to catch big chub in match conditions, and that understanding their habits was the key to this.

A change to the venue for the annual match with Wimborne in the late seventies had repercussions on the type of fishing though. Instead of the deep slow stretches we were faced with shallow, weedy water that had mostly dace and a few bleak. The perch had disappeared due to disease by 1977.

The summer Stour

At best the matches were a struggle, and swims could appear devoid of fish after less than an hour. The first year we fished the water above Wimborne it was not too bad; I had around 4lbs of roach, dace and bleak. A year later I had the same swim but the fish had disappeared. It was a downstream end peg and eventually after two hours the floating casters I was introducing produced some rises 80 yards downstream. Thinking they were bleak, I managed to trot my bleak rig down to the rises only to find myself attached to a chub of nearly 4lbs. The feeding drew them up and two more followed that were in range of a trotted stickfloat, and three chub for 12lbs was easily enough to win; a pound of bleak being second.

A year later we were back on the same desperate venue. This time I had a narrow bend swim with far bank willow bushes. It looked good but after three hours I was waterlicked. I could see the bottom right across the river, and it appeared devoid of life.

I decided to go for a walk down to the next angler who was a hundred yards away. He hadn’t caught either and he wandered back with me to my swim. We sat ten yards back from the peg on a high bank overlooking the swim whilst we ate our lunch. As we stared at the river we suddenly realised that there were three big chub in the swim, fish that had miraculously appeared. I set to catching them with a vengeance, landing one at 4-08, losing another and scaring the third. It was my only fish but enough for third place. Despite feeding heavily with casters it was bread flake that finally tempted them.

Bits of the jigsaw were fitting into place. Chub could be caught in match conditions. Chub liked casters. Good bait presentation and feeding were vital. And more importantly, they didn’t need to be in the swim at the start. That winter saw a restocking of dace and grayling from the Nadder. It boosted catches that had become desperately poor.

The following summer I drew a very fast shallow (less than a foot) glide that had some of those stocked dace and grayling. It was good while it lasted – 4lbs in the first hour but there was nowhere to draw fish from, and after three biteless hours I wandered down to the next angler who was a hundred yards away. He’d yet to get a bite in the shallow pool that he was fishing yet was persevering with his trotting and light feeding. We chatted away and he explained what I was starting to grasp. That the chub wandered around, moving up to a hundred yards during a match and that it was the anglers that stuck at it that would get them. With just half an hour to go he had a chub at about a pound and a half. Vindicated, he fished on. In the last ten minutes he got another but this one was around 4-08. That was enough to win with 6lb.

By the following year I’d passed my driving test and got a car. It wasn’t long before I was fishing the Stour, Avon and Thames regularly for chub. I finally started to get lots of experience catching chub, learning how to feed them and land them in weedy swims on fine tackle.

More matches on the same stretch followed. A new concept entered the equation; there were one or two pegs where there was a shoal of good chub in residence. These pegs always had features like overhanging bushes in contrast to the shallow, open stretches with weedbeds. If you drew one you could launch an all out attack for chub with caster. It was my misfortune to draw the best peg on the first day of the season – where were the chub? The answer, of course, was upstream, cleaning themselves.

This chub weighed 5lb 3oz and came from the stretch mentioned in the mid eighties (probably equivalent to a 7-pounder nowadays)

Into the eighties the advent of carbon rods made playing chub easier on light tackle. Better hooks (Drennan Carbon Chub) helped too. Gradually I refined my float fishing methods, learning to use much smaller shot to improve bait presentation and catch on the drop with small waggler floats.

With match fishing you never stop learning, and there was plenty more to learn. Through observation of feeding chub I learnt how the chub fed avidly at times whilst avoiding the bait with a hook in it. Through experimentation there were ways to fool them – finer lines and smaller hooks was the starting point; sometimes it was only when scaling down to a 22 that they would bite at all but then you had the challenge of landing them. Sometimes the opposite tactic of a big lump of flake on a big hook would fool them into dropping their guard.

In two winter league matches scaling down to a 22 got me chub when I couldn’t get a bite on a 20, desperate measures but on cold, low, gin-clear rivers a necessary tactic, and one that brought two wins in a single series when half the anglers blanked.

I realised that few of the match anglers actually knew how to catch the chub, and that if I could catch them by design I had an edge. Another, older, angler also had a habit of catching chub when it really mattered. I took the trouble to figure out his tactics. He relied on caster, and ignored the small stuff, feeding caster heavily throughout a match, confident that two or three bites would be enough and that he had enough skill to land the fish that resulted from those few bites.

This single-minded approach needed careful execution, especially in team events when failure to get the chub would mean a dry net, as there was no easy option to catch the small stuff to get out of jail. I did apply this approach in some matches. The heavy feeding had another effect; it choked off the minnows.

One summer evening match I had no less than ten pints of casters. Normally I wouldn’t buy that sort of quantity of bait for a match but I’d scrounged a load of leftover bait the previous weekend after a team event. Drawing a noted chub peg in a weir I decided to give it the heavy feed treatment. I certainly had no minnow trouble that evening, feeding all ten pints to get six chub and win the match. Afterwards, many complained of being unable to beat the minnows so my tactics were vindicated though I’m not the sure I’d want to buy that much bait for a match.

This has been a small sample of many matches involving chub on the Stour. Catching them was often essential to success, and knowing how to still gives me plenty of sport whilst pleasure fishing. More recent developments have been my attempts to catch chub on pellets.

In the next article I explore the quest for speed; how catching fish at up to 400 per hour could be a match winner.