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Middle Dorset Stour 15,16 Nov 2018


The Flying Tench

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I've always wanted to fish the middle Stour since someone told me it was a place where you could reasonably rely on a good bag of roach with a good chance of a fish over 1lb. I was able to combine it with visiting a family member. Would the fishing come up to expectation?

 

15 Nov 1.30-4.30pm. The fishing shop steered me in the direction of a 'mill pond', weir pool really. But this immediately raised a question. Where on earth in a weir pool do you find roach? Such experience as I have of weir pools involved perch, trout, chub and a few dace, but never roach! I felt the most likely place for fish generally was near the tail of the weir pool where the flow curled nicely against the bank, but my health requires me to sit for fishing most of the time nowadays, and there wasn't a suitable spot. In the end I sat on a stanchion where I could fish the back flow and tried casting a maggot feeder into likely places. My theory was that, even if I only caught very small ones, it could give clues as to where the fish were. But after nearly an hour - zilch. So I moved to a spot on the main river 100 yards below the weir pool.

 

As I was set up I continued with maggot feeder. The first fish was a small roach, and I became hopeful that there would be more. But the next fish was a perch, and the next, and the next...… It was a relatively short session as I had spent a fair bit of time exploring and moving swim, but I had about 8 perch with a couple over half a pound, not too bad on maggot feeder.

 

16 Nov 11.30am -2.30pm A different 'mill pond', but I decided to try the main river again. It was quite narrow but about 10ft deep with a nice medium flow. I decided to feed roach specific ground bait (as I thought) to avoid the perch, and started with feeder to ensure the feed ended up where I wanted it. I planned to switch to float when I had a reasonable layer of bait laid. I started with single maggot on the hook. After a few minutes a gentle bite - perch. After a few more minutes - big perch, 2lb 6oz no less! Well that made sense, my ground bait was attracting lots of little roach which attracted the big perch. But then a 3 inch perch, what led him to be there? And so it went on, always perch, though none over 4oz except the big one. I tried trotting a maggot through - perch. I switched back to feeder with bread on the hook - nothing at all.

 

On the way back I met an angler who'd had a nice bag of roach up to a pound, as I'd been led to expect, but my experience from two sessions was that the river was full of perch. Of course I was delighted with the 2 pounder, and if I can arrange another trip I shall go armed with lobworms!

 

Out of interest, has anyone else fished the middle Stour?

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