Another short session, another blank!

I had about two hours free first thing on Saturday morning - just enough time for a short session after chub on one of my most-local stretches.  Of course the river is still high and coloured but it is a little lower than recently.  Today's plan is to ledger a strong-smelling boilly in a couple of swims, the alternate bait being lobworms. 

My first swim is the one closest to where people park cars.  As such it is often fished but I have had a rather mixed record there.  Years ago, it was a good barbel swim, especially fishing upstream on the gravel beds below the willow.  But I'm not sure many barbel have been there recently.  Last season I had two five pound chub from this spot from four or five attempts and Mark, I guy I often see fishing this stretch in winter, had a 5-12 chub and a 3-03 perch.  So it can fish well.  This morning I only gave it 40 minutes or so and had no suggestions of a bite at all.

Just after I settled in the second swim, where I planned to spend the remaining 90 minutes of my trip, there was a long rain shower - so hard that I actually stopped filming as I was worried about the camera.  I may have had one bite in this spot - on one occasion there was a definite small twitch and the bait was gone.  But as always, this could have been crayfish.

I spent the last 20 minutes bumping a lobworm bait along the far bank with no success. 

So no fish again.  Other than the state of the river itself, I think my current problem is that I'm not fishing for long enough.  I have been 5 times this season but have probably only fished for about 12 hours.  So this week's plan is for a longer trip of perhaps 6-7 hours, maybe Tuesday or Thursday.

But the forecast is for more rain and so the rivers will remain high and fishing will be quite hard I suspect. 

Today's video does show me fishing in the rain and so is an accurate example of what so many of us fisherman face on a regular basis.  "My fishing life" aims to reflect the true circumstances of my fishing, not just when things go well.  So for the moment, I am continuing to post videos of me not catching anything!  There is something almost Zen-like in a series of fishing videos in which no fish are caught - a direct pointing to the emptiness of reality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJf3m4jo_kI&feature=plcp&noredirect=1

Sitting in a bed of stinging nettles in the pouring rain at 6:30 on a Saturday morning not catching any fish.