One of those days

This morning I headed to a new stretch of river with the aim of tempting a decent chub to test my new rod. This stretch of river isn't known for being very prolific, but the chub tend to average around 4lb and can reach up to 6lb at the right time of year. The river level seemed spot on and the weather was favourable with plenty of cloud cover.

I spent the first hour walking the banks finding a few suitable swims, before settling for an area with a crease around a rod length out, running parallel to the near bank. I fed hemp and maggots whilst setting up and shortly after 0600hrs I had my first cast. It took around 45 minutes of steady feeding to get a first bite, I hooked into what seemed like a reasonable fish but after my initial optimism it turned out to be a trout.

A beautifully marked trout which was safely returned

Despite continuous feeding I couldn't buy another bite from the swim so after an hour I moved to an area of deeper/faster water. I changed the float to a 'chubber' style effort which was more suited to this pacier water. The feed was kept the same as the previous swim and again I was struggling, no bites, not even from minnows. After 2 hours in this swim I had caught a tiny minnow sized chub so I moved further downstream to an area of similar depth but a lot less flow.

The third unsuccessful peg of the day

I decided to scale my tackle down to the lightest I had with me, 3.3lb mainline, 2.6lb hook length and a size 20 hook. I fed the swim with caster and hemp for around 20 minutes before casting. The first trot down with caster on the hook and the float buried, a minnow! The next cast resulted in a similar bite which was from a chub smaller than the minnow. The next 40 minutes went by without a bite so I called it a day before lunch. Even though conditions seemed spot on I had a feeling I was going to struggle, one of those days when nothing really goes wrong, but nothing seems to go as planned either.

On my journey home I took a detour to my syndicate water to see if anyone was fishing, which they weren't. I had a bit of a walk around and raked the weed from some pegs in case I can get on there later in the week for an eel session.

Wormery

Last summer I set up a small wormery in one of those purpose built bins, however after some initial success all the worms had died after a couple of months. I most probably put too much kitchen waste in and everything went mouldy. I had about a 1/4 kilo of dendras left from my last eel outing so I set it up again, hopefully I'll have more success this time around.

Looking ok after a week