River Kennet, Newbury, Sunday 8th August 2010

Nemesis is too strong a word but if there’s one NAA venue where I’ve always felt a little disappointed with the results it’s this one. I’ve fished it in prime condition during the Autumn/Winter and had some enjoyable days but I haven’t really found the chub & perch it’s known for. The logical thing to do then was fish for those species in the middle of summer wasn’t it?

Flawed logic maybe but the day felt perfect as I was making sarnies in the kitchen before departure. It was overcast and mild but there was also an intangible ‘goodness’ in the air. Steve was due to join me later, we could decide how the world should be run as well as fish a bit.

First success was just a dabble in the river on the way to way to my intended swim. There’s a spot next to the path which is quite reliable for small roach & dace so I thought I’d try to save a blank straight away. It worked, a bream of a maybe pound put up a much better fight than it should have, I thought it was a big dace at first.

Second swim was a renowned chub location, so renowned that I haven’t seen or caught one despite several hundred trots through. It’s a far bank overhanging tree lined swim so quite tricky to cast to, it’s possible to fish amongst the roots on the opposite bank but difficult to get anything out if you catch. My Wallis casting is improving in terms of distance but accuracy still leaves a bit to be desired so not many of my efforts were close to the bank. One was though and it resulted in this chub of 2lb 10oz;

So, a good day already and soon after Steve arrived with the lobs. We chewed the fat for a bit whilst Robbie the puppy German Shepherd sat patiently, obviously bored and frustrated at not being able to join in but very well behaved. Steve had left his sarnies in the car so it was only a matter of [not much] time before his stomach called the shots. I wandered off downstream and found this swim;

It may as well have had a sign above it saying ‘Rusty fish here’. A perfect chub swim so I reached for the lobs and tried for perch just letting the float rest up against the vegetation. After the first tiddler the biggest perch I’ve ever caught struggled to evade my landing net, thankfully it failed;

It looked massive in the water, I was convinced it was well over 3lb but the scales confirmed a weight of 2lb 12oz. A fantastic beautifully coloured specimen. That was it as far as I was concerned, everything could go wrong from here on and it wouldn’t matter. Steve arrived back having eaten and fished the back stretch (in that order), we alternated the swim but the crayfish had moved in by then. Steve hooked a couple of crays but the perch were still there and this 2lb 1oz fish got to my lob before the signals;

The plan had been to try the canal for perch but with all this action on the river there seemed little point. Never the less I did walk over and have a try. The vegetation made it impossible to get to my favoured swim and the boat traffic was quite heavy. I tried the lock cut in between boats and managed this roach on a lob, not huge but quite fat and worthy of a pic.

Steve left at about 4:30pm and I stayed for another hour in the perch swim. My lobs had all snuffed it by then, no amount of prodding, poking or being impaled on a hook would induce wriggle. Still sufficient to tempt a perch of 1lb though and with that I set off for home.

What a day. Wrong month, wrong weather, wrong time of day but nobody told the fish.