He just knew where one would be hiding, no matter how unattractive the spot might be. Rubbish-rafts and scummy accumulations are, we know, dead-‘certs’ as fishy sanctuaries and you needn’t be a genius to roll a bait under one and catch a chub.
This bloke I knew only as Doug got a kick from extricating chavs from the least likely spots; he really did. I sat fishing an Essex river with him once, just downstream from a hideously desecrated area where some drainage or bank-restoration work had recently taken place. After an hour’s successful blanking Doug reeled in, hooked-up and struck-off with his rod and a bait-can. Naturally I assumed he’d walk past all the Caterpillar tracks and the piles of mud to fresher pastures beyond, but no…I watched, curious, as he knelt – some way into the field – and baited-up! Now from where I was sitting this looked absolutely bizarre and I watched, puzzled, as he lifted his rig and carefully dropped it into the grass immediately before him! Within twenty seconds his rod came alive and Doug was soon to be seen on his knees reaching down then coming up with a very respectable chub of around 3lbs!
Not quite sure of what I’d just witnessed I reeled-in and hastened to Doug’s side and the scene of the fish’s capture – a straight trench no more than two feet wide, freshly-dug from the river and into the field. Doug had dropped his bait where the trench terminated some 25 feet in. I confess to be very, very impressed! Doug hadn’t been able to see the fish as the water in the trench was the colour of milky coffee and, he told me, about 2 feet deep. He told me how fish – not just chub – love to explore new territory and this reminded me of the time my club lake rose to submerge a weeded slurry bank and the carp had gone completely bonkers. Clearly this was true because that fish had ventured up a blind alley with barely enough room to turn in.
One of Doug’s ‘banker’ swims (on the same river but many miles downstream) was the concrete surround of a run-off pipe: attractive it wasn’t, and the river here could hardly be described as such – more of a ditch really. But Doug always made a bee-line for this unholy feature, holding back, staying low and dropping his bait with a deliberate ‘plop’ into the unseen murky outflow. Nine times out of ten he’d be into a fish within seconds and he wouldn’t see the water he’d successfully plundered until he came to net the fish.
It must be said that Doug wasn’t a noted all-rounder with any kind of reputation but he was supremely adept at shoe-horning chub from the most unlikely spots – or should that be the most ‘unattractive’ spots? After all, they weren’t at all ‘unlikely’ to Doug!
