He is also a very keen angler, having come back to the sport in 1995 following a break of several years. In this regular column he will tell us about his progress as an angler – his thoughts about the sport, what he learns, the fishing trips he makes, the anguish, the humour, in fact everything he experiences as his angling career develops. | ||||
BATS, BADGERS AND COWS – AND SOME FISH THROWN IN FOR GOOD MEASURE! After my recent disclosure that it had been thirty years between visits on the Trent, I was determined that such a time gap would not develop again; and so it was, that within a week, I was back on the river. Due to other commitments I was not able to get there until a couple of hours before darkness. Still, it was plenty of time to bait up a few swims in anticipation of some chub action that would happen once the sun set.
As the rod tip started to indicate, something was happening at the business end of the tackle. I gently grasped the rod, ready to strike at the appropriate moment. As I pulled the rod back and hooked into the fish I could feel something decent at the other end. It certainly lunged for the cover of the overhanging willows. Playing my usual guessing games, I put the fish at the other end of the line as a chub in the 4-5 lb bracket. So imagine my surprise when a few moments later I slipped the net under an eel, which weighed in at a shade over 1 lb. After this there were no more fish to report during the rest of the session, and as midnight approached it was time to pack up and leave. Earlier on in the session I had seen what was without any doubt the biggest bat I have ever set eyes on. It was massive! It certainly had the credentials to be an extra in a Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing movie. (If you know what I’m talking about, then like me, you’re getting old!). Without any doubt at all, any angler that regularly fishes into dark encounters bats on a regular basis. Sometimes, from the point of view of bite detection, bats can be a real nuisance, as they continually fly into the line, causing the rod tip to bounce around. However, after a time one gets experienced at spotting ‘bat liners’ and you don’t find yourself striking continually into thin air.
For example did you know that of 4,500 species of mammals in the world, almost 1,000 are bats? It is also illegal to kill a bat in the UK, with the penalty being a fine of up to £ 5,000 per bat killed, not to mention the six-month prison sentence that goes with it. Life begins at forty? Well, not for a bat, although they do live to a sprightly age of thirty years. But what about the bat I saw? Well, I discovered that there are sixteen species in Britain, of which six are endangered or rare and six are vulnerable. Looking at the information I decided that the bat that had startled me on the Trent as it flew in front of me was a Noctule. Call me an anorak, but I actually enjoyed finding out information on the mammals and spent the best part of an evening conducting research. Now that my chub campaign is well and truly under way I made a visit to the Upper Severn. Heading for a new stretch, I gave myself plenty of time so that I could locate the water and walk its length before finally settling on where to fish. It was a stretch that hasn’t seen an angler for a long time; the dense undergrowth confirmed that.
However, there was no lost tribe awaiting me at the other end, just the River Severn! I baited up and then began to set up suitable tackle to handle an upper Severn chub. Casting out I was almost immediately into the first fish of the session. It was a chub, but a small one, certainly no more than 6 oz. But as I admired the fish I was impressed with its pristine condition. It’s certainly no exaggerated statement to say that this fish, and the majority in the river in front of me, had never been caught before. And that fact could be multiplied many times over in relation to other river venues. In fact the far bank, although not as dense as where I was fishing, had certainly not seen any anglers this season either. There were actually old rotting wooden fishing platforms, still just about hanging onto life, in spite of the best attempts of Mother Nature to remove them from the landscape. These relics of a golden age when rivers were packed with anglers certainly did not look stable at all. I don’t know about you, but I often have that extra sense, the one that tells me something is going on behind me. The common term is ‘having eyes in the back of your head’. Anyway my rear skull vision alerted, I turned round to find a herd of cows staring at me from the top of the bank!
As far as the fishing was concerned, I caught a further four chub, each one larger than the previous. The final fish came just as darkness fell; as it slipped into the net I was convinced that this was a big ‘5’. I was very surprised to see it register at just 4 lb 14 oz. It was a long fish however, and had plenty of capacity to pack on some weight over the next few months. Listening to a night of European Champions League football on the radio, I decided to call it a day at 10 pm. I was quite tired and it is a journey home that takes me about an hour and a half, so by the time I got back to the car it would be another midnight arrival. On the way back, just outside the Shropshire village of Much Wenlock a badger raced across the road from the hedgerow to my right. I was convinced I was going to hit it and even felt the air bounce off it as it must have come within a centimetre of the car door. I turned around and drove back to find that a close miss was the verdict as no body was on the road or in the field to the side of it. I don’t know who was the most shocked, the badger or me, but we were both safe and that was the main thing! There’s a whole lotta shaking going on in next week’s Pilgrim’s Progress, here on FISHINGmagic. In ‘EARTHQUAKE! BUT IT’S BUSINESS AS USUAL ON THE DOVE!’ I’ll tell you how, living almost on top of the epicentre, I felt the full blast of the recent earth tremor. But the Dove barbel remained oblivious to what was going on beneath the earth’s crust. All will be revealed next Thursday. See you then! The Reverend Stewart R Bloor Pilgrim’s Progress – read it every Thursday! |
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