Thursday March 1st Bristol Avon and plenty of chub

Having just returned from a holiday in Mexico where the temperatures were 28c it wasn’t so bad to go fishing today at a warm and pleasant 13c. A trip to Keynsham Angling centre and two pints of red maggots I was ready for a short afternoon session on the river. We had no appreciable rain over the last two weeks while I was away so the river would be low and clear.

When I arrived at 2pm I just couldn’t believe how low and clear the river had become. I think it’s just not the Bristol Avon suffering, the H.Avon and D.Stour are painfully low. Have a look at this article on the BBC web site to see how bad things really are http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17078727.

Soon the otters won’t have any water to swim in and that will soon speed up some action stopping abstraction.

I started off fishing a couple of swims but the flow was so poor and other than a few small 2lb chub, roach, dace it would seem that the larger chub didn’t want to play ball.

The day was glorious, bright blue sky and the birds singing like it was spring. It wasn’t until the sun started to lower in the sky that some of the larger chub came on the feed. I was fishing a new swim that had a steep bank on the far side where the river was slightly deeper. About 2/3rds down the swim was a snag where I thought the chub would be. The river here isn’t much deeper than three and a half feet. The swim couldn’t be fished from the other bank and there was shallow water either side of the run so it screamed out chub.

Having catapulted out maggots for a bout 10 minutes first trot down produced a chub. Have a look at the video.

I finished off for an hour with cheese paste in a tight little swim further downstream and other than some small plucks from smaller fish nothing stirred.

So even if you should have just a small window of opportunity after work, try some chub fishing and you could be in for a surprise.