Short river session

I had a short 4 hour session on my local river today, targeting roach and skimmers. I was on the riverbank and setup by around 0730hrs, I initially started with a 5m whip fishing maggot on the deck and I started getting bites after a couple of minutes.

After around 30 minutes it was a bite a chuck and I was catching small perch and roach every put in. I decided to setup a feeder rod and fish further out to see if I could tempt anything larger into feeding. I clipped up the feeder rod around 40 yards out and balled in 4 large caster laced brown-crumb balls. After around 15 minutes I had a small eel on the feeder. I continued on the feeder line for another 15 minutes but I didn't have another knock. I went back to the 5m whip swim and it was still a bite a chuck, mainly small perch.

Better stamp of fish on feeder

After another half an hour I went back to the feeder and started to get bites straight away, a better stamp of roach and some similar sized skimmers.

Typical river bream

I had a couple of larger bream on the feeder, whilst the 5m whip swim was still producing numbers of small perch and roach. Bites were still coming on the feeder line, then I had a cast off and decided to call it a day as I had things to do in the afternoon.

60 (ish) fish for around 6lb

I ended up with around 60 fish in just over 4 hours made up of mainly perch, roach, a few skimmers, a couple of dace and a solitary eel. The largest skimmer being just under 2lb. Next time I'll try and concentrate on the feeder line and try get some larger bream as they run to around 6lb on this stretch of the river.

Last week I also had a day at a local commercial that I hadn't fished for over 10 years, I ended up with 15 small carp to around 1 1/2lb and around 15 roach and rudd up to a pound.