Took a 2/3 day fishing break on the free stretch of the River Frome with 3 objectives:

a) catch a really big roach, though I realised this was a long shot

b)catch some middle-ranking roach

c) get a pb dace

Well the biggies weren't around, and it turns out there are very few middle-ranking roach there. I was mislead on that score by a local angler when I dropped in in September. So that left the dace.

Unfortunately they were a bit AWOL also. Some exceptional dace had been coming out till a week or two ago, but then after some heavy rain they'd gone somewhere! Apparently you can normally get many more bites than when I was there. I did catch about 10 dace, and they were mostly chunky fish of about 6 oz. In fact, I've never seen such fat dace. I met one angler who assured me he'd had a 1lb 7oz dace 2 weeks before! I said that I thought the record was 1lb 5oz, and this didn't seem to faze him at all! He showed me a pic on his phone, and it certainly looked a huge dace, broad and torpedo shaped.

Other than that I caught some brownies. It's possible one or two could have been small sea trout, but they were mostly brownies. And I met some very helpful local anglers - but no roach!