18th Jan - Speen Moors and the K&A canal.

After rekindling my interest in fishing the rivers and fishing a few sessions on a stretch that I'm familiar with I decided to give Speen a shot. Having read a fair bit about it in Chris and Rusty's respective blogs I decided to take a loaf of bread and wander around to get an idea of the swims etc.

Things didn't start ideally... I'd loaded up with tackle after baiting a few swims and just two steps from the car I slipped and ended up with everything caked in mud. To make things worse a group of joggers saw the whole thing and were in fits of laughter!!

Anyway, after a bit of walking I stumbled upon a weir that looked very familiar from the pics I'd seen on here so I set up a cage feeder and gave it an hour or so, catching a chub of approx 3lb and a brownie slightly smaller.

For some reason I then decided to check out a new section of the K&A in the hope of a few decent perch and that's where the drama started.

I drove up the track, over the bridge to the other side of the canal and came to the "car park", that was actually a muddy slope.

Now, I'm not quite sure what went through my mind but for some reason I decided my rear wheel drive BMW was in fact a 4x4 and decided to try and turn around on this patch of mud and park at the top of the slope. Within seconds I realised my error but instead of stopping and coming up with a solution I went all Jeremy Clarkson and decided POWER was the wise option. I thought if I gave it enough welly I could spin the car around 180 degrees and end up facing the right way.. to cut a long story short, that didn't work at all and after a while I ended up facing the right way but at the bottom of the slope and merely feet from the canal and slipping sideways. At that point I decided to stop being me and do what any "normal" person would have done in the first place and stopped to weigh up my options.

After a few minutes of deliberation I decided to knock on the window of a barge that was parked at the other side of the bridge and was met with a couple of very friendly fellas that were more than happy to give their assistance. With a combined effort we managed to push the car a suitable distance from the canal. Once that was done and I'd made the only phone calls that I thought may help, the two blokes invited me aboard their boat for a cup of tea and a very overdue cigarette. I hastily took up their offer and went aboard with visions of the film Hostel going through my head. Nearly 2 hours, numerous cups of tea and plenty of conversation later I'd totally forgotten about my car and had a couple of new friends who I now knew to be a gay couple and the cousin of a good friend of mine from my years at college.... small world.

Half an hour later the AA turned up and with the patrol man driving and all 3 of us pushing we managed, with an obscene amount of effort, to get the car back on the track and my dilemma was over.

I popped off to the local shop, bought the two guys a bottle of wine to say thanks, politely declined their offers to come back aboard and went home to reflect upon the most bizarre fishing session I'm ever likely to experience.