River Kennet, Thatcham, 13th November 2010

A last minute trip this one, I had to buy bait for Monday’s Barton Court visit so I thought I’d combine that with a quick couple of hours on the CSAS stretch of the Kennet. Mild overcast weather after a cold snap looked promising so with permits exchanged off I went to a swim that Arbocop had shown me during the Summer.

I haven’t actually caught any chub from this spot yet and that miserable record continued today, however, I did catch this massive gudgeon first trot.

With no witnesses I had no choice but to relinquish the potential accolades (and a chance to be splashed all over the weekly front pages) and so popped him back. A reasonable dace followed but after that no further bites from that swim or any of the others I tried further down.

With that I returned to Happy Tone’s to swap back permits and buy some deadbait for Steve who was at Colthrop. He was intending to fish into dark for barbel and when I arrived he’d been fishing prelims with a whip and a feeder rod losing a large perch at the net on the former (estimated 3lb +). We compared headtorches by pointing them at each others face and concluded that 1) both are capable of screwing up your vision and 2) it was a silly thing to do. His was half the price of mine though.

Dusk was looming so out went his barbel rod complete with disgusting smelling hookbait, the deadbait rod was fished closer in. I borrowed the elasticated whip and float fished lobs for perch a bit further down. I caught one too, my first on a whip and what a strange experience it was. The ‘rod’ was brilliant for plopping the bait just where you wanted it but once anything was hooked it was like using a huge boingy thing. The perch was about a pound and I would’ve known that had I been using my own rod, with the whip though I had no idea how big it was until I saw the fish. Think I need a bit more practice to fully understand rods without reels.

A shout from upstream suggested that something worth viewing was being played. Steve had thought that he’d got the large perch lost earlier but it turned out to be a pike of maybe 3-4lb. I must say it looked a similar size to the pike I’d caught on the Thames from Steve’s boat a couple of weeks back. On that occasion my trophies were firmly in the ‘jack’ category but strangely Steve’s fish was a proper pike, odd that.

I left just before darkness really set in and haven’t heard yet whether Steve caught any whoppers. I hope so.

Roll on Monday