Hampshire Avon for a couple of days

I hadn’t fished the Avon for a while and it was time to try again. Andy (you should have been here yesterday) Cowley would be fishing with me. The weather had been dry with little rain and the river level had been dropping. I had it in the back of my mind about fishing a swim where I had 2 6lbers in early Dec. The level of the river indicated that I should be able to hold bottom across the river against the willow branches.

Sure enough I could hold bottom with an extra lead on the feeder. The depth was about 6ft or so and the flow very strong. I couldn’t catapult out maggots so rather bait droppered out about 1 pint of maggots.

Leaving the swim for about 30 mins while tackling up would hopefully give time for the chub to come in to feed. During the morning I only had a small one of 3lbs 15oz. Still no blanking!

Then during the afternoon I had 2 5lbers.

5lbs 6oz chub

Then I had a couple of hooklink breakages for no apparent reason. The tackle was balanced as every time a piece of weed accumulated on the line the feeder would be dislodged. I hadn’t come across this before and I changed hooklink line to another spool of line.

5lbs 9oz chub

I lost a couple of other hooks with the same reason. I was puzzled.

That was it for the day. Now I don’t like leaving hooks in fish but I was unsure what was going wrong.

Great sunset

Next day 

I said to Andy I wanted to get some of my hooks back from those chub I lost yesterday. The river looked about the same as I arrived in the early morning. I bait dropped some maggots in and started to cast the feeder out. There were some bits of weed coming down in the flow which kept me having to recast every 5 mins. It was a right old pain in the rear.

I eventually found out my problem with the break offs. The loop of elastic in the feeder with the swivels were catching in the added weights inside the feeder. So I need to reconsider the setup in the future when adding additional weights to the feeder.

I had one small 3lb chub in the morning but had to move as the weed problem became too much of a problem.

I moved to another swim where I was totally wiped out with minnows taking maggots when on the float and feeder. So it was a trying day for me. This is the first disappointing day for me on the H.Avon for a long long time.

Andy found a good few chub and even had a great fish of 6lbs 2oz on the float.