Mark Wintle

I rarely get a chance to fish the Thames nowadays but have fished it a great deal in the past especially at Oxford (mainly Medley) and more occasionally at Clifton Hampden which is much closer to Didcot ( I actually lived there until I was 3!). I found Medley a great float venue in summer, fishing hemp and tares or hemp and caster for roach, just over the weeds in gravelly swims. There are also plenty of bream in some swims and these mostly come out on the leger in mid-river but you need to fish the right swims, using a feeder with groundbait and something like worm and caster on the hook. The Channel below Medley is better for chub than Medley nowadays. On Medley in winter I've done well in recent years using a tiny moving feeder with liquidized bread in the feeder and a big piece of flake on a size 10 hook, getting mainly roach but it's a skillful game, almost like trotting a feeder so the setup has to be right as does the flow. Clifton is a deeper venue with some bream swims - I once drew right on them in a big ODAA match and had 10 bream to win, again on the feeder, but generally did better on a waggler with maggots, feeding hemp, catching roach, and I wasn't afraid to use big bodied wagglers with lots of shot down to get through the bleak.

It was Ray Webb who travelled around with Bob Reynolds. Ray Webb did a book on tench fishing with Barrie Rickards. Got a feeling that Bob Reynolds ended up in prison in Ireland.

My recollection is the opposite; the EA/NRA issued blank books to the tackle shops and trusted the tackle shops to settle up quarterly except that more than a few tackle shops went bust and failed to pass on any money hence the EA transferring the job to the Post Office who they could trust to hand over the money.

If it's a hybrid then roach x chub but there's precious little detail (fin ray counts, scale counts) that can be ascertained from the photo. It could just be a chub. For reasons unknown roach x chub are comparatively common in the river Ribble.

The degree of hybridisation in a water can be used to measure degradation of a water, especially rivers that have been dredged.

The vast majority of fish hybrids are first generation hence 'F1' for 'filial' generation 1. Backcrosses ie a hybrid breeding with a 'pure' fish are possible as are hybrids breeding with each other but, and it's a big but, there tend to be so many genetic defects in the resulting fry that survival rates are very low and the chance of catching a second generation hybrid exceptionally small even in waters with lots of hybrids. Beyond the second generation (F2) the chances diminish even further and the chance of catching a record fish with a 'trace' of another species ie F3, F4 etc. almost non-existent. DNA testing to distinguish a F1 hybrid from pure species is about 99% accurate which is a lot better than checking photos, and with checking a F2 about 96% accurate. I don't think anyone has had access to any F3s to check such is their rarity. I have many photos of hybrids including ones that include silver bream, bronze bream, rudd, roach, chub, bleak, goldfish, crucians and carp and I suspect that all bar a couple are definitely first generation. I think the AT statement is misleading!

Without spending hours looking through my Daiwa catalogues the likeliest scenario is a hollow tip for waggler fishing and a finer spliced in solid carbon tip for stick float fishing. Rods like this are rare but Shakespeare also did a similar model about 30 years ago.

Dick Walker was working with Hardys and the Aircraft Research Establishment at Farnborough in the very late 60s and early 70s. They made less progress than he hoped and Hardys were less enthusiastic than Walker believed they ought to be. But these early rods were all fly rods not match rods. Without doing a lot of research I don't know when B&W started with carbon match rods but suspect circa 1978/9. I had a B&W XLS around that time but that was glass. There was a carbon pole for sale in 1975 at £300 which was 9 metres. From memory my first carbon match rod was a Sundridge Kevin Ashurst in late 79, a rod notorious for breaking easily and a massive flat spot on the tip.

The Avenger 1000 are rated 2-4lb max, ditto the 2000 and original; the Avenger II is rated to 8lbs. The heaviest I've used on the 2000 is 4lb Sensor (actually 6lb bs) and that was pulling barbel out of snags.

There were carbon match rods around from 1975 but they really kicked off in about 1978, mostly at around £100., very few less than £80 so it's possible the Winfield is a low carbon composite of which there were a few about in that era.

Avenger 1000 perfect with mainlines of 2 to 3lbs.

Thames at Oxford is day ticket with plenty of good fish. Top Tackle have advice and day tickets - http://top-tackle.co.uk/

A cheaper but similarly good in term of design reel is the Shimano Exage in 2500 size. Some decent Daiwa smallish fixed spool reels also available at a good price circa £60 - the 2508 size is the one to get - the Whisker model would be a decent choice.

Chalk salts (calcium carbonate) dissolve in water and as the temperature drops they crystallise by coating fine silt particles causing the now heavier particles to drop out of suspension and the water too clarify. As the water warms up again the salts dissolve again and the silt is carried by the current again.

It seems to me that B&W went from relatively high volumes of coarse rods in the 70s and 80s to much lower volumes in the 90s and onwards with their British-build, hand-crafted rods commanding high prices struggling to compete with the higher volume rods from Normark and Daiwa at the top end. For instance the Geoff Bibby rod is very rare and a very fine rod - I've only ever seen one - and it may be that B&W produced a very small number of Powerlite match rods sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s without many anglers being aware of their existence.