Evening session down the Colne today with a float rod- just as a few weeks ago, decided to go down there as have a match on our club lake at Wraysbury tomorrow where there's a pretty good chance of a blank. No double figure barbel on inappropriate hooklength this week but still not a bad evening.
Walked down there after the worst of the rain and got there 4 30ish. Peg I was aiming for had a branch down in mid river making it untrottable so walked a bit further to the "evergreens " swim. Last nights rain had put a tinge of colour in (although still gin clear by most river's standards)
Set up a 3 no 4 stick with a 20 to 0.11, went to set up landing net. Which wasn't there, or rather, the handle was but not the net which was still sitting in my carryall in the cellar....
Oh well , couldn't be arsed to walk the three quarter mile home and back, so its land fish in keepnet time ( landing them is the easy bit, unhooking them when they are trying to swim to the bottom of the net isn't.)
Started fishing at 5, about 4ft of water, most flow under my feet and slower across. Fed both lines, started on inside and straight into nice dace - would have been netters in a match, or possibly even today if I'd had one. Dace began to slow after half an hour, had one grabbed by a pike about 4lb which I landed, so switched to a line about 2/3 over that had kept fed. A couple of quick small roach and then a proper thug chub which I thought was a barbel at first the way it headed straight upstream. Only roach and dace for the next half hour and then another chub a little smaller than the first, and another about a pound. Still at least one more chub there as saw it come up among the loosefeed but couldn't get it to make a mistake and things gradually got quieter until at around 8 there was a huge explosion of bubbles where I reckoned the loosefeed was hitting bottom .Barbel time ! ? Deepened off, moved shot down and held back hard where the bubbles had come up, float dipped under and added a 5lb bream to the collection... Gave it another fifteen minutes but light was getting very bad for the float (really dark swim under a lot of trees) so called it a day.
Two chub probably just short of 10lb between them and overall including the pike would have had around 25 lb. Not a bad three and a half hours work.Strange lack of perch, only had one, and no idea where these bream have appeared from- that's three times in a row that I've had one here, all from different swims, and have heard of a few more as well- if they have come from downstream they must have come through the shallows below Longbridge on their sides like flounders...