A weekend back in my home town fishing with friends. Saturday was spent on the punt with Alan and his Dad (Trevor). The river was slightly up and coloured and Alan decided to go for the Barbel straight away, usually a slightly hit and miss affair during the day. However, within 10 minutes he had had a confident bite and was into what turned out to be a small Barbel around 2lb. We spent the rest of the day catching small stuff with a sleeper rod left out in the hope of a bonus Barbel or Chub. As it turned out the Barbel and Chub were proving elusive but we did catch plenty of Dace, Bleak (too many!) and the odd Roach. After popping home for dinner I returned with another fishing pal (Michael) and we met Trevor by the river with the plan to fish off an island into the night. I had heard plenty of stories about this stretch of the Thames from Alan and Trevor and was eager to see what all the fuss was about! The setting certainly didn’t disappoint; it was a stunning stretch of the Thames with plenty of features and a seemingly endless number of ‘fishy’ spots that I was eying up for future visits! The fishing itself was slightly patchy – a few hours into the night we had had only two small Chub to show between the four of us and were wondering whether it was going to be a quiet night when Michael had a run on his rod. This was obviously a much better fish and after initially weeding him, seemed to swim straight towards us. Unfortunately that was the end of the excitement, for some inexplicable reason Michael’s line went slack and after reeling in the line was clean cut above the feeder. It was very mysterious and frustrating, for all of us! We spent the rest of the night fishless deliberating what could have happened and what the fish could have been. Pike attacking the feeder, line cut on the gravel, I guess we’ll never know but it seemed like a good fish and goes down as another story of the one that got away...

On Sunday we opted for a change of scenery and went towards Newbury to fish Wylies Lake hoping for a Tench. This was my first time specifically targeting Tench so I wasn’t too confident but was looking forward to hopefully getting some fizzing around my float. Unfortunately despite baiting up a few likely looking spots only Trevor could get the Tench fizzing in earnest in his swim and he did well to land a lovely fish around 4lb losing another late in the day. It’s a lovely lake in the most improbable location (next to a bowling alley) but it certainly has some good Tench and I think I will have to have another crack at it in the spring when the Tench are perhaps a little more willing to feed.