River Thames, Pangbourne to Goring, Thursday 10th March 2011

A tough day on the Thames with Steve but in the best tradition of blogs the bad days must get reported along with the good days. Today was a monumental blank. It started quite well, I’d forgotten my camera which all anglers know means you’re going to catch several species all of improbably high weights. Steve, however, had remembered his camera so we were back to square one.

We drove all over the place, either trolling as we went or at full throttle to get to the next weirpool but nothing we tried resulted in any kind of a bite. The river looked perfect and the rain was just about holding off, it was the wind which was our worst enemy today. Pitching up was tricky, it seems an obvious thing to say but nowhere is as exposed as a wide river when the wind’s up. It made casting & trotting very difficult. The upshot was that we never really got settled in one place and built up a swim. We were trying things here and there without any real gameplan, the wind made it difficult to stick at anything for too long. The final straw came when early afternoon trolling towards a place where we had caught pike previously, the clouds darkened, a light shower came and it blew horizontally. Back to the sanctuary of the harbour then.

Thanks to Steve for taking the boat out at all, he’s got a tough day tomorrow but as always was good company. On Saturday he has the pleasure of meeting all sorts of weird and wonderful AN’ers at the LIF, who could possibly want any more than that.