With the heat wave finally over and an overcast day forecast, I was looking forward to spending a whole morning on the river in the hope of catching a chub or two.
Summertime on the Stour June 2017
Arriving well before sunrise, I set about fishing the first swim on the beat. This peg usually has a few chub knocking about early season. Today was no different, except I managed to miss the only bite in two hours. With conditions favourable, I intended to try a few, not so easy to reach, swims in the hope of spotting a few chub before targeting them. I set about positioning myself in my second swim among a reed bed that gives a great view of a decent sized gravel patch, between two large weed beds. Feeding hemp, corn, boilies and pellet upstream of the patch, I stood heron-like waiting to see if any fish would turn up. First to arrive were a few dace and then a few small chub. Then something bigger entered the swim from below and swam slowly up in front of me, before drifting under the nearside weed bed. There was no doubt in my mind that I had just spotted a grass carp, which had possibly entered the river during a flood in recent years. It sadly had a few old war wounds but had managed to survive an otter encounter or two. Along with the grassie, a few chub were drifting over the feed above me, however, a pike arrived and that was that. The grassie wasn’t put off by the presence of a predator and kept drifting up through the swim and every now and then it would go down on the feed. Watching it for an hour or so it was starting to look catchable, so I decided to try and have a go with some sweetcorn on the hook. I waited for it to leave the swim before placing my hook bait in an area that it had visited, but it never came back. So after an hour, I decided to put some more bait in with the intention of returning later. After a mug of tea and a couple of texts to friends, I decided to have another look. This time it was clearly feeding on the spot under my feet, so with nothing to lose, I lowered in a boilie when it left the swim and waited for its return. It kept doing the same circuit each stint spending more time on the baited spot. For over an hour it was near the hook bait, I could clearly see its tail going as it scoured the bottom, but I didn’t get any indications on the line. It was feeding on some of the freebies, however, I could still see quite a few boilies untouched on the bottom. I decided to swap back to three grains of corn. Within 20 minutes of replacing the rig on the gravel, the fish moved up over the corn. There were two twitches on the quiver tip when the corn was hoovered up. I struck, the swim erupted as the fish realised it had made a mistake. I applied as much side strain as possible, to stop it getting to the sanctuary of the downstream weed bed. Luckily everything held, I got its head up over the net and scooped it first time round. Success! I was soaked because I had to go in over my wellies in the thigh boot deep swim to stop the fish reaching the weed beds. But I didn’t care! I heaved the net through the reeds onto dry land. I could not believe what I’d just achieved. Resting the fish in the net while I sorted the scales, mat and camera. I first took a few trophy shots before putting my first grass carp on the scales, the dial swung round and settled on 16lb 8oz.
Spotted and stalked over 4 hours – 16lb 8oz Dorset Stour June 2017
I got back in the river and held her until she swam off strongly. After that, I was on cloud nine. I sat down, ate my packed lunch and decided the chub fishing could wait until another day and headed home a happy angler.
It has had a few close encounters with the local otters
Fish Tales From The Riverbank 