Pastures New and Old Foes.

 

 Since the R.Anker had thrown up the greatest of all fish I had already made the decision to sleep for the night before making the journey to the R.Dove which is was once again going to be a first, a river I have long since had designs on fishing but never got there, so with the Anker being around half hour north it is fairly close, having never fished the Dove, it was once again going to be a reccy trip.

 Once I had finally found the river after a call to Ade who has been hugely supportive this last few weeks I set about making the long walk to the top boundary to then have a good look and see what I was faced with.

 After the recent rains the Dove was up a bit and heavily coloured, this I felt for stalking which I had in mind was not ideal so I very quickly decided to take on a static approach and set about fishing each good looking spot for around 45mins and then move. I didn't realise that the Dove had Crayfish and they were everywhere! I could not get away from them, so after 6 swims and a good few hours I walked my gear to the centre of the fishery and then went rolling meat, amazingly within a couple minutes I had a brief follow from a Barbel about 7lb which looked like it was going to take the meat and bailed out at the last moment, the fish then drifted out of sight under a bush and regardless of how hard I tried to get that fish to commit I simply could not manage it. 

 For the rest of the day I moved around and feeding lightly I hoped I would come across a Barbel, unfortunately that did not happen and around 10pm I packed up. 3hrs 50min drive back home, but a blank on the Dove didn't matter a jot, that Anker success was enough to let me forget the rest.

 A few days later I made my way over to the Blackwater to carry on my pursuit of a double which unfortunately was met with the same level of nothingness which I am constantly subjected to on this particular river and two days back I made another trip again with an outside chance to make it happen but all I did was continue to remove Crayfish which I seem to be good at that, but very little else is happening on there, even Carp, Chub and Bream seem to be completely missing. I really do feel like the window on a Blackwater double is closing, the Otters are having a profound effect, even if they aren't eating all the fish their presence is moving stocks around so fast I can't get lucky and find them, not through the want of trying. But one thing that is true is that I will continue to keep trying, I won't give up on there, not just yet.