One of the benefits of living so close to a decent fishing river is that you don´t need to plan a fishing trip long in advance. Sometimes, if you have a bit of time on your hands and nobody has any plans for you, it may be possible to leap in the car and just head out on spec. That´s pretty much the way things panned out yesterday. There was a break in the weather. The grey clouds parted a little and the sun started to break through. I took one look at the sky outside and said “Yeah! why the hell not!”
The river is just beautiful at the moment – cool and clear as a chalk stream. It is also brimming with life. Even so, large stretches of “pristine” water have been vacated by the fish and you may have to do quite a bit of foot work to come across them. I “surveyed” about a kilometre of lovely-looking water in a rather crude way by simply wading upstream pretty noisily watching for the fish that I would spook in the process. In shallow stretches an unseen fish will often give its location away when it bolts. I saw three fish in that section, all in weed cover, and there were some lovely runs which were unoccupied. View full article »
