With the river season now well and truly behind us, I have had a chance to look back on the last few weeks fishing the Hampshire Avon. The new year saw me putting my barbel gear away and concentrating on chub fishing.
I have to say the river conditions were somewhat challenging, with the river height up and down like a fiddler's elbow! One minute the river was over the banks and in the fields, the colour of strong tea. But almost within a few days the river levels dropped to their bare bones and ran gin-clear. This seemed to set the scene right through to the end of the season. With such varying conditions, the fish never seemed to settle down it was a matter of continually changing tactics to keep the bites coming.
During the times of high water and good colour providing you could get to the swims the chub responded well to simple leger tactics with 15 mm Crab n Cray boilies presented on long hook links with a small PVA bag of crushed freebies. Recasting every 30 minutes or so kept a nice flavour trail going downstream. This tactic accounted for some decent bags of chub with up to eight fish at a sitting.
However, when the river dropped and became very clear the chub did not respond in the same way. I thought winding them up with red maggot on the float would do the trick and although I caught a couple of fish it really didn't work as I expected. I was sure that I wasn't getting the most out of the swims I was fishing. It dawned on me that the chub didn't want to chase moving bait so it was down to feeder tactics which really worked well.
I was using a modified 50 gr Black Cap feeder that I fished in line with a four-inch hook link and either a single or double maggot. The next change of tactics came via an unintentional bit of luck. I was just about to leave for a session when I found the maggots in my fridge had sweated up overnight and were performing the great escape! I spent quite a bit of time sieving and drying them in a shallow tray but I didn't have any maize meal to finish the job adequately.
I suddenly remembered an old ruse that I had used before and took a couple of handfuls of my ever faithful Crab n Cray boilies and put them through the food processor to create some nice crumb. This was spread over the maggots which made them much more useable.
The extra flavour added to the maggots and the trickle of crumb coming out of the feeder certainly had the desired effect. This proved to be the go-to method for the rest of the season where I really enjoyed the last couple of months catching a stack of specimen chub including three different sevens.
Now i'm really looking forward to my spring, and early summer tench fishing which I will no doubt be reporting back on.