I went yesterday on a small local river,had another day of wrong tactics,wrong bait for my swim of choice,though had a reasonable amount of fish,started on the feeder on meat and pellet,had a few smallish chub,barbel and a dace,went on the float and caught quite a few more similar sized chub,before coming into the slack water where I'd seen good roach feeding on pellets i'd thrown down to attract passing carp and barbel,I caught several nice roach down there before changing to hemp and tare,first fish was a ten ounce dace,I went on to get twelve or thirteen more dace between six and eight ounces(lovely fish)plus fifteen to twenty roach up to twelve ounces before foul hooking a barbel that broke my hooklink under a snag,so I fished the straight lead down where i'd had the roach and dace and went on to catch 3 small barbel,by small I mean 6-12ozs,again lovely to see,a nice day by the riverbank with my three new found friends a robin and its two fledgelings which the parent brought down and were all sitting on my 3pt bait box helping themselves to 4mm pellets,another lovely sight...
On the downside of my day my swim had obviously attracted a very poor caster on a previous day,a leafy branch(well off the water)had three long lengths 5m of at least 10lb line with flotsam gathering on it,just upstream another similar length of line hanging from a bankside bush,above me I could see a loafer in the rushes,on my first cast on the float I picked up on another length of very heavy line(yes,my float landed exactly where I wanted,in the river,lol),luckily it was around 10m long and was attached to a piece of rope upstream and I was able with considerable effort to get the end of the line,wrap it around my sleeve and break it at the rope,so at least got some of this dangerous stuff out. This river is narrow,with no need for overhead casting anywhere,so there are some very poor casters fishing....