A social session

Yesterday I spent the day on a river with the members of a local forum - Teesside Angling. We arranged to meet up at around 7am but I struggled to sleep so I decided to get up early and get an hours lure fishing in on a water close to the river.

The water is choked with weed so I was using weedless frog lures on the surface. I was expecting plenty of action but the pike seemed fairly inactive and although plenty of fish were topping I didn't see any pike strikes. After 20 minutes I had a take but it was off after a few seconds, another 10 minutes later and I had another take which again quickly freed itself, both times the lure was taken very close to the marginal reeds. The takes were half hearted unlike the usual takes I have been getting with these lures, the pike have been launching themselves at the lure, I was hoping that this start wasn't the sign of things to come.

My first gudgeon in 15 years

I met up with the lads and picked an area with a bit of depth and plenty of overhanging bushes which screamed chub. I heavily baited an area with boilies and a mix of pellet and used my heavier rod with a running lead and a hair rigged bait over the top.

I used a basic blockend feeder on my lighter rod with a caster/maggot mix aiming to pick up whatever came along. It took around half an hour for bites on the feeder to materialise and the first fish caught was a gudgeon, then a small dace and another gudgeon soon followed.

A lucky escap

A positive take on the feeder and a better fish was on, I thought it was a chub but as I got it closer to the net I saw it was a small pike. The fish was going to be netted the pike bit through the hooklength. After that I went for a bit of a wander and had a chat with the other lads and it seemed that no one had caught anything of note.

After an hour or so I rebaited my heavy line with 6 baitdroppers worth of hemp and pellet and carried on fishing the feeder. I had a couple of small dace and was considering setting up the stickfloat rod but then the tip went round and I struck into a better fish. The fish was giving a good account of itself and I was having to put a lot of pressure on to keep it out of the snags, I had the net ready and I could see the fish was a chub of about 3 - 4 pounds. I was drawing the chub towards the net when it made an attempt to get to the tree roots on the near bank, it succeeded and managed to break the hooklink on the roots! I quickly retied a hooklength, cast into a similar area within 30 seconds the rod was off again and I struck into what seemed to be a similar fish to the last. The fish took me into a mid-river snag and the line went solid, I allowed the line to slacken hoping the fish would swim out but it wasn't to be and the fish was off. Two decent fish lost within 5 minutes!

After losing the second fish I went for another walk to see if anyone had caught anything decent, which they hadn't. At around 6ish I baited the heavy line again ( during which I lost my baitdropper in a bush), I then gave the swim a rest for an hour. After another chat with the lads I had my final cast and I sat it out until 1030pm without a touch on the heavy rod. After checking this morning the two lads that stayed on until midnight didn't get anything either. Between the 7 of us fishing we failed to land either a barbel or chub although the water was a little low, the river had a bit of colour in and it was overcast for long periods so I'm surprised we didn't catch. I ended up with 5 dace to 6oz, 4 gudgeon and 2 perch, fishing wise the day was a bit of a disaster but it was good to put names to faces and I'll be definitely be attending the next 'forum fish in'.