When it rains and the colour is that of a cup of tea with hardly any milk there's usually only one species of fish you can rely on targeting, the Chub. Chub have a very good sense of smell but when targeting them using bread flake you'd expect fishing to be hard but once the fish are located they seldom stay anonymous for long. This session was only a short one and large Chub (6lb+) are extremely unlikely, but for the time spare a longer journey wasn't a possibility so I made do with some trotting in less than ideal conditions.
I arrived at the river I had in mind to find it firmly in flood, I thought to myself that it would be tough, if the Roach were feeding I'd find them in the slacks and on the creases as the main flow would just be too much for them to constantly hang in, I did initially plan to ledger breadflake in the margins as a 4oz lead/feeder wouldn't hold in the flow but in the end I opted to use a 7BB wire-stem float and fished it over depth around 6-8 inches. For a good half an hour I had one little knock on the float but it didn't materialise further.
Then I had a little brain wave, this was to bulk my shot all down around 3inch from the hook, then moved the float back to around full depth, effectively I was rolling breadflake and using the float as indication as normal, a few trots in and the float sailed away, fish on! and in these conditions I suspected I wouldn't get many enquiries so I had to make them all count. First blood was a 4.01 Chub, this was followed by another three fish within a 45 minute window, the remaining three went 4.03, 4.06 & 4.13. No fives this time around but they are there, one of the Chub I caught was exactly 22 inches in length and only weighed 4.03, that fish in the Stour with that length would probably go 5½lb and maybe even more, problem with some of these bits are the head of fish is vast and the food I suspect isn't enough to sustain the population, whichever it is I know it isn't right.
Best of the short trip, 4.13. |
I caught though and that was the only wish for such a short session, next up is either a bash at some Barbel closer to home or a nice jaunt to my big Chub fishing grounds.