Small River Adventures - Part Two

That big Perch had me thinking all the way home and it was the first thing I thought about when sorting through my gear the next morning. Getting a pass to go fishing was tough but I managed to swing it and I was back on the river again for and afternoon session. 

Different plan today, choose a swim and fish it for a good few hours, I chose a spot on a bend that looked particularly fishy and started to feed maggots to try and tempt a few larger residents out from the far bank cover, it was deep, almost six foot but the fish were there. I started to catch small Dace and Roach as well as a few Chublets and then bingo, I hooked into something much bigger, I had visions of a huge striped beast rolling into my net but it turned out to be a Chub of three pound and four ounces.

Chub with scars from a previous encounter

It was a good start, so the maggots kept being fed and the fish kept coming but I was hoping for one big stripey, I had a few smaller Perch but the big ones kept themselves hidden. Before I made a move I had a new species, I don't ever recall catching a Ruffe before and was rather pleased to have met one, looked very similar to the sea scorpions I used to catch in the Menai Straits.

Spiky beast

I moved back upstream a few pools to where I'd lost the Perch the day before and saved all my best worms for this pool, it only took a couple of trots through to connect with the first Perch and after a good high speed thrash around the swim it was safely in the net. It wasn't anywhere near as big as the fish I saw yesterday but it was an improvement on what I have at the moment at one ounce over the pound. 

A pound and one ounce

I gave the swim a rest and just fed maggots for around ten minutes before trotting a worm through again, I was sure that the thrashing from the first Perch would have spooked the swim but I kept getting bites and it was a few trots later that I connected with another good stripey of exactly the same size, it may have been the same fish!