I much prefer to catch chub in rivers of that there is no question. But if your quest is to catch an outsized fish, 7lb and above, then a stillwater is the place to seek them as they do grow much bigger in the confines of a stillwater. And by stillwaters I don’t mean commercials, I’m referring to lakes and gravel pits. These generally being found on the floodplains of rivers where the floods have exchanged fish stocks from one to the other, or have been purposely stocked in them where they are not on the floodplain.
More years than I care to remember now there was a gravel pit on the Trent called Winthorpe Lake just outside the village of Holme that contained some huge, to us as teenager match anglers, chub. Far bigger than anything we’d seen caught in the Trent at that time, and in reality they would have been fish of 5+lb. If the match fishing on the river was slow to nonexistent we’d nip across the field and have a go to see whether we could catch one of these leviathans that swam about in the crystal clear water of the lake. We never did, they were so cute and adept at picking ever free offering off and leaving the hookbait alone it was unreal.
An observation the late great Peter Stone made in his book on Big Chub in his quest to take a fish over 7 lb (7. 04) from the Oxford pits he fished at the time for them. Much of Peter’s success with big chub, including his PB, came on deadbaits in those pits. Something we never thought about or ever used on the dabbles on Winthorpe Lake. If only Peter had wrote that book 10 years before he did, we might just have nailed one of those infuriating fish we saw taking all the free offerings.
What is truism regarding big chub in totally enclosed waters as above is they grow very big indeed, but rarely have a continuity of stock, dying out when they reach old age, to be no more, unless a new stocking is put in.
