I rolled up to the river about 2pm and had a fair old walk in the heat. Anyhow, first fish was a small'ish chub...
After that I had some seriously huge dace which took double sweetcorn and half a dozen maggots. They were that big I had to look closely at them to make sure that they were infact dace....they were. I'd left my blower in my sling on the bank and really couldn't be harrised to wade back to take a pic.
There was a upstream wind and as I was casting hard across river I somehow managed to get a nasty wind not whilst performing a cast and I had to retreat to the bank to strip off the line to the knot and then re tackle my float and hook.
This prompted me to move further upstream to a very alkward place to get to where I always seem to catch barbel. As I got to the spot I realised i'd left my landing net resting on a rock mid river on the previous swim which i'd just left....darn it!
It was only about two thirds of a mile back but the walk was quite hard as a couple of hundred yards were actually in 5 to 10 inches of fast flowing water on slippy rocks so I thought i'd have a few trotts and then go back for the net.
Anyhow, I had those few quick trotts and caught this chub...
As soon as i'd had that chub I walked back to make sure my net was still there. Luckily it was
.
I moved several hundred yards up from where i'd originaly left the net and waded out across the river to fish as close to the far bank as possible, which was beneath large over hanging trees where the water was only about 8 inches to 15inches deep, so very shallow. I had some really good scraps off some quite decent chub which felt every bit as powerful as barbel (although the fight was not as prolonged as a barbel puts up) as they bolted for the tree roots and fallen trees etc along the bank.
One fish snapped my line against an obstacleseveral inches above the hook, it was either a chub or a barbel.
I had maybe a dozen nice chub around this size...
I also had a number of smaller chub and average dace.....no barbel though. Strangely enough I didn't even see any jumping or flashing which they normally do at this time of year as they try to remove the argulus lice.
As I walked along the river I noticed lots of pools holding thousands upon thousands of fry, many of these pools were cut off from the river as it has receded since the recent rainfall. Unfortunately these fry are all doomed!
There were lots more pools which will also become cut off from the river as it drops further still and again the same fait awaits many more thousands of fry that occupy those pools.
This is just one stretch of river so the amount of fry lost in this manner along the whole length of the river must be millions....quite shocking!