With Brian working this weekend, I mulled over my options on Friday afternoon. In the end I plumped for a short morning session on the river, with Barbel or Chub in mind. I figured that the conditions were pretty good for extracting one of the resident lumps.
I checked out the EA river levels site and it confirmed that the river was just starting to fine down again after the rain earlier in the week. The EA site quite useful for gauging the state of the river and it should come into its own during the winter months. It may have been covered in other blogs, but here's a link in case anyone hasn't discovered it yet:
http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/floods/riverlevels/120748.aspx
The river was maybe a foot or so up and it looked promising.
I tried pellets and meat (spiced and plain), but I couldn't get a bite and I royally blanked. To be honest I've suffered many a blank here in search of Barbel, so it's nothing new. I'm never put off from returning though, as I know it contains the fish of a lifetime. One day...
I amused myself for most of the session by watching the plentiful bird life, which are now a lot easier to spot amongst the bare trees.
In case you didn't spot it in the above photo, here's an enlarged shot of a Kingfisher that was working down the far bank and dropped in at my peg briefly.
I hope he did better than me!
Hi Sean, thanks for the link.
ReplyDeleteIt takes a bit of digesting at first, i.e. working out what reading at any given location relates to a normal level. I quite like the graph because at least you can figure out if the river is rising or falling.
ReplyDeleteI've decided to stick with the Warwick reading as my yardstick and I plan to plot some readings on my fishing days.
The theory is that it should take away any guesswork and save me the odd 30-40 mile round trip to a swollen and chocolate coloured river!
Sean bad luck with waspo that can be a funny section of river at the best of times.
ReplyDeleteCheck your email cos I have sent you a message.
Dan