I decided on a session during the day today. Firstly I needed to get a sandwich from the bakery so an early start was out of the question. Secondly, I wanted to work out if the river fished ok during the day. Having spent most of my life fishing ponds and canals, I know that early morning and late evening are the best times to go but hear that rivers are more consistent during the day. I have yet to prove that to myself.
I fished peg 3 again. The river was about 18” higher than it was on Wednesday evening and was falling. I therefore had to fish from a higher position.
I setup my lighter tip rod (6lb line) for fishing cheese paste and bread up to the downstream tree/bush. The idea being that this was most likely to pickup Chub and I liked playing them on the lighter rod. I would setup my Barbel rod and fish meat / caster / lobworm mid river (or just this side of the main flow) in the hope of picking up Barbel.
I also used a new technique of supergluing a piece of expanded foam (from some product packaging) onto the shank of a size 8 hook. This would help secure the cheese paste and bread flake and would also counterbalance the weight of the hook somewhat.
I swung out my cheese paste near the tree and started to setup my Barbel rod. The cheese paste had not been in 5 minutes before a very good bite - that I missed! This set my expectations for a good day!
The forecast for today was for overcast cloudy skies and frequent rain. However the first 3 hours were very sunny and quite hot. I am not sure if this affected the fishing but I struggled to get any other bites. I checked the forecast again and it looked like the rain had moved to around lunchtime. Therefore I decided to setup the float rod whilst the weather was reasonable in the hope that I could run some cheese paste or breadflake near the tree and see if they wanted a moving bait. I decided to try a 2AAA Truncheon Waggler rather than an Avon float this time. This did not result in any bites.
The level had now fallen to the point where I could get to a lower plateau that was close to the water line. I decided to move down before the rains came. It is much nicer fishing near the water line. This was a good move as the rain appeared soon after and with no real warning - went from sunny to heavy rain almost instantaneously!
Around this time I started to get knocks on breadflake near the tree. I alternated between flake and cheese paste and eventually breadflake accounted for a good bite and the following Chub of about 2.5lb. Interestingly it had bite marks on both sides and I did wonder if it was the same fish that I caught on Wednesday that came with a Pike attached. In some ways, I hope it was because that proves that the fish survived.
This Chub gave a decent account of itself and was significant in that I set myself a target of 10 Chub from the Ure in my first season - this was no.10 and came within a week of my 1st Chub. So now it’s time for a new target - I think a 5lb+ Chub should be my aim now.
Although I had a few more knocks, there were no more positive bites despite the cloud and rain.
So my thoughts are turning to my next session; I think I will give this weekend a miss as I have been quite tired and was falling asleep several times today. I think that my next evening session will involve roving between pegs because it looks to me like cheese paste and breadflake result in fairly quick bites when swung near a tree/bush if there are any Chub in residence. That will also mean that I can travel very lightly and will just have to risk the odd soaking - hopefully the new Diawa Retex bib-brace and coat with waxed hat will keep the worst of the rain out.
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