The Towton chublet IV

Saturday, 25 September 2021 at 14:23

I resolved not to weaken (and, for example, fish red maggots for chublets and dace). I stuck - the verb is apt - to barbel fishing, devoting a minimum of five hours a day to the task. I also resolved to bait up and fish at least three swims each session. This devotion involved lugging shoulder- and neck-wrecking amounts of gear from swim to swim. I began to understand why some anglers use wheelbarrows to transport their gear. It was hard, monotonous and lonely work and I began to stink of garlic-infused bait. Even the ducks swam away quickly when they sensed me coming. None of it was any good. It's strange: after several hours watching a rod-tip - a quiver-tip, as here, on a Terry Eustace-designed blank gifted to me by Lord Rhodes - your mind doesn't so much begin to drift as hallucinate. A barbel fin cuts through a sponge cake. Bream float singing through clouds.

The Towton chublet V

Saturday, 25 September 2021 at 14:17

Which brings me to the chublet. One evening I weakened, improvised a trotting rig and fished the fast water - a stream which is inaccessible at normal water levels. This fish represented some of the result: a chublet which inhaled a brace of casters. Never was a man more delighted with a miniature chub than this writer. All the same, this last trip wasn't merely an angling defeat. It was a humiliation.

What a difference a day (or two) makes

Wednesday, 1 September 2021 at 14:02

Two days ago we enjoyed a bumper day on Harray. Today the wind still blew from the North but was slightly stronger and a great deal cooler; the fish were in a different mood, much less hungry and more inclined just to bump sullenly at the flies. We went through a gamut of Cats, Maids, Hogs and Munchkins (and their variants - see image), all tied in sizes 10 and 12, but nothing worked particularly well. We moved some very good trout which didn't stick and in the end - the end of a half-day's fishing - we had half-a-dozen each, with the best few well over the pound. That was good enough.