26th June Fishing on the river Wye. What a session!
I had booked the beat earlier in the year on the middle stretches of the river Wye. The problem with booking early is that it’s impossible to know what the weather will be doing and what state the river would be in.
Now as we all know June has been one of the wettest on record and this has been reflected in the height of the rivers. Since last week I had been keeping an eye on the weather forecast and the river height. Both of these can be found on the EA web site. At the end of last week the river had rose 10 ft and peaked on Saturday. Then Saturday night we had more rain and I thought my chances were gone. All day on Sunday my wife said that I was like a bear with a sore head. It takes 36 to 48 hrs for the river to rise on the lower river once it rains in the hills. So I couldn’t believe my luck when I didn’t see any appreciable increase late on Sunday.
I arrived at the fishery at about 7am after a delay on the Severn bridge by a traffic accident. The river looked to be full and very brown and up about 5 ft. I looked at the stretch I was fishing and found a couple of swims that had a good pace about them without too much turbulence. I’m trying to look at walking pace for the speed of the flow in the swim. Sure enough I found one that suited the bill perfectly. I took a rod and did a bit of feeling around and found a snag (3 leads later) about one third of the way across the river. Upstream from here was a good steady flow with a gravel bottom. So it was here that I started to feed. My mix is fairly straight forward, some halibut pellets of differing sizes and some halibut powder to hold it together in the feeder. Not rocket science at all. The feeder held still in the flow and was about 3oz in weight.
The mix
The bait was 12 or 14mm pellets that were lassoed on the hair. This works really well for me. Hooklink was about 18″ long. I tend to use a running swimfeeder rig with a couple of beads as buffers.The days weather had been about the best it had been for weeks. Blue sky with some cloud but at 21c by far the warmest.Some times it takes a while for the bait to start to draw fish into the swim. Because the Wye is a big river and the fish don’t mine some disturbance I tend to recast every 10 minutes to enable plenty of bait to go in. If you look at a feeder of pellets it’s not very much in terms of volume. You take a feeder cast in each 10 minutes and after one hour then it’s only about the size of a big ball of ground bait going into the swim……..not very much! Anyhow after baiting up for a while and getting the barbel to feed the rod gave that 3 ft twitch. Aghhh not a barbel but a little chub that came off after a few seconds. Then another chub of about 3lbs came to the net. They didn’t know that they shouldn’t be feeding in this coloured water, to be fair if they waited for the river to clear they would have already starved to death.Then I had a beautiful barbel that went 7lbs 12oz. Have a look at the video to see how things went during the day.
So the day went very well. I caught pretty much throughout the day. Having had 13 barbel from one swim I believe I did the correct thing to move swims.Sometimes though this doesn’t pay to move.In total I caught 19 barbel and 3 chub. The river was dropping much faster as the day wore on. I packed up fishing at 8.30pm as bites had almost dried up at this point. I’m sure if I had stayed longer I might just have got that 20th fish, but that target can wait until later.
The size of the fish was quite good with two 8’s and a 9lber and a good deal went over 6lbs.
9lbs 2oz
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