Chubbing

A couple of weekends back, somewhat unusually, I found myself with plenty of time to go fishing and was determined to make the most of it. I really wanted to get my string pulled and had already decided that Chub would be my intended quarry as they are usually pretty obliging.

On Friday Afternoon I headed straight to a favourite area of the Trent from work and although there was a chilly wind and an ever present threat of rain the river looked pretty good for a few bites. And so it proved! I made my first cast at exactly 1pm and was netting my first chub of the day at 1.05! A promising start indeed.

Nothing else occurred in that swim other than a couple of tentative knocks so I headed to the next pool. The new swim is probably one of my top five reliable swims for getting a Chub from and this occasion was no different. Two quick fire bites yielded a fish on the bank and another lost to a snag.

I never bothered recasting in that swim due to the disturbance and headed to a nearby feeder stream which I've always fancied for a fish or two. It can't be more than 8-10feet wide and certainly no deeper than 18inches so it took a bit of stealth to get into position but soon enough I was fishing. It took around 10 minutes to get any indications but after a couple of gentle plucks the tip smacked around and a chub of around 4lb was soon in the net.

Suitably chuffed it was time to move back to the main river and a swim I've always fancied but never caught from. I decided to sit it out and keep the feed trickling in to see if anything could be tempted. 20 minutes later and a solid bite gave me a small fish of around 2-3lb.

By now the weather was starting to close in a bit so I decided to try one more swim before hometime. I sat it out in the horizontal rain for around 20 minutes and missed three bites in succession before landing the biggest chub of the day at 4lb-odd. I was getting soaked so home beckoned.

The rain dried up overnight and I awoke next morning to fairly decent frost. I only had a few hours in the morning so I opted to head to the Soar for a quick session.

I parked up and was pleased to find I had the whole stretch to myself so I headed to the most popular swim on there to get it out of the way before the expected crowds turned up. It's a well known spot which can often chuck up some good bags of chub and my plan was to catch what I could from there as quickly as possible before moving on to a couple of favourite spots at the top end of the field.

The plan worked a treat because I managed to catch two Chub from the hot swim and another from just upstream. As I setup in my third spot I looked down to see two other anglers setting up in the swims I'd just vacated and they were making a right old racket shouting to each other and marching about along the top of the bank. Fortunately I was well out of the way and another Chub was soon being netted.

I sat it out for another half hour before deciding the field was getting a tad too busy. There was the two aforementioned anglers setup downstream and now there was two other chaps walking around with rod and net in hand looking for some chub like me. I headed to the next field down which is completely barren of sexy looking chub features and nothing like as popular as the area I'd just been in. Experience told me the bigger fish often frequented this area and I wasn't wrong, once again the biggest fish of the day was the last and I was soon headed into town to run some errands.

Sunday arrived and blow me if I wasn't out fishing again! Phil joined me for a trip to the river Dove and conditions weren't exactly great. Hard frost and very bright sunshine didn't fill me with confidence and it proved to be a real struggle. By midday we'd had nothing more than a couple of tentative knocks and we were deliberating as to what to do. Should we stay or should we be looking for fish elsewhere?

An hour later and we found ourselves back on home turf on the Trent. The remaining couple of hours of daylight yielded three small Chub for me and I lost a fourth, Phil blanked so it wasn't a great result considering the effort we'd put in, there always next week I guess.

In case you hadn't noticed the pics above are even worse than my normal efforts, this is because I killed yet another camera and am having to make do with a compact thing for now which is pretty poor. Ill wait till the new year now before I go and get another I reckon, just hope I don't catch the fish of a lifetime in the meantime and end up with crappy pics of it!

 

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