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Internet Angling Club Fish-In


Rusty

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Lower Itchen Fishery, Thursday 16th February 2012

 

The origins of The Internet Angling Club (IAC) are difficult to establish, there’s little recorded history of the club’s activities and it’s not possible to pin down a ‘base’ on the internet. You might be forgiven for thinking that this is a deliberate ploy in order to hide all sorts of sinister rituals and ceremonies but I’m afraid the truth is a little more mundane, websites need more attention & maintenance than mailing lists do.

 

So communications are via e-mail, if you respond to a list mail everybody sees it and you see everybody else’s responses. Add to this the fact that the subject matter varies enormously and you have a recipe for a very busy and entertaining inbox, so much so that I struggle to keep up with what’s going on. AN’ers who are also IAC members include Alan Roe, Mat Hillman, Glenn Smith (Spindle) and Chris Plumb, there are others who use an alias unknown to me so for the time being they’ll remain incognito.

 

This was an opportunity to meet some of the e-mail addresses, the subject matter of the e-mail “LIF Fish-In” caught my attention straight away and as I haven’t fished there this season I signed up. Ritchie & Stu kindly offered to pick me up, Ritchie was suffering from man flu and didn’t fancy an early start so we arrived at the fishery at about 10:00am. I got an extra hour in bed and we missed the worst of the traffic so that worked out well.

 

We drove up to the main hut, met with Glenn and then formulated a plan, a very loose plan. Most decided to walk to the upper limit of the coarse section and fish back to the car, a very sensible idea. I wasn’t in a rush to fish the main river preferring to target the carrier for chub (or whatever was in it), I’ve dabbled there previously but never given it a proper try. It’s little more than a ditch and chub can be caught from the Itchen itself so my decision to walk it can be put down to simple curiosity.

 

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It’s a bloody long ditch though, by the time I’d explored all of it I was back at the upper limit of the coarse section. I found a couple of pools similar to this one which begged to be fished but both flattered to deceive, other than water there was nothing in them;

 

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It wasn’t an entirely fruitless exercise however, far from it, this beautiful chub vindicated my decision to spend a couple of hours away from the main river;

 

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Having achieved my objective I set about drinking lots of tea. I then set off downstream stopping only to acknowledge that Mother Nature will have something to say if you drink lots of tea. On my travels I caught just one small grayling and a couple of trout one of which was two feet long and only four inches deep. More importantly I was able to meet the other IAC members, the familiar “cawt anyfink mister?” proved invaluable as an ice breaker and just as I was about to greet Neil he did indeed catch sumfink, this perfectly conditioned pike;

 

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Apparently the pike grow to quite a size but you don’t often see people fishing for them. A sight more common on my journey downstream was a quivertip rod ledgering worm for the grayling, it was proving to be a perfect recipe for trout but to be fair the grayling were noticeable for their absence on this trip. Amongst the IAC’ers there weren’t any significant grayling catches reported but Ritchie did find a group of chub in the 3-4lb bracket. Landing 3 of the 5 bites proved tricky in the flow, chub of that size put up a good struggle anyway but give them some fast current to work with and you’ll find yourself walking down to the fish with the net.

 

After a very long walk I finally arrived back at the fishery entrance, I had a quick try under the bridges for roach but gave up when 1) I didn’t catch any and 2) the traffic noise got on my nerves.

 

So that was my day out with the IAC, they’re a very amenable group of anglers and I look forward to joining them again at other venues. Many thanks to Neil for organising this Itchen trip.

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