Thursday 8th September H.Avon

After another chip and chicken plus a coke meal in Ringwood and a good nights sleep I was soon heading towards a good chub swim where I had spotted a few big chub. In went some hemp, however the chub were very cautious in coming out to play. This could have been because yesterday I was going to fish the swim, however Pete Reading already had a guest in the swim. Whether he caught or not I’m not sure, but the chub were all very wary.

The swim contains some big barbel and chub but nothing came to feed. Soon I was heading back to a banker swim. Again out went some hemp and the chub were soon hovering up the bait. However there was nothing much there of over 5lbs, so I didn’t even cast into the swim.

I walked the river bank for ages and found a barbel feeding close in on some pellets I had put in, it must have been about 8lbs. Further upstream I spotted 6 chub which were all around the 5-6 mark plus a smaller group of between 3-4lbs. I bait dropped some pellets as a change to see what happened, well they just went straight for it.

I let the swim settle and went to look at the swim with the barbel in. It had gone however there was a carp feeding on the bait only a small thing of 6lbs or so. I didn’t return again.

I fished the pellet for a couple of hours and had a few pulls from the chub, but again on reflection I was using the wrong tactics.

As a last ditched effort to get something I put on a source boilie and after 10 minutes the rod hooped over and a nice chub came to the net.

So at just under 4lbs it was a nice chub and a relief. The bigger chub disappeared after this and it was time to do some leg work again to look at a different stretch.

Here I was walking the bank and seeing a guy playing a barbel, it was only about 8lbs or so and it got him weeded a few times. But hey ho he was catching and I was taking note of where he was fishing.

The sun was shinning and life was good. I did give him the thumbs up.

Even though I didn’t catch any monsters over the last 3 days I’ve seen some good fish ready for the autumn and early winter campaign.