Float fishing for chub

If it wasn't the start of the river fishing season, I suspect I wouldn't be going fishing at the moment, but I am so excited to be back out on the rivers that I went again this morning for a few hours before work.  When I woke up at 4:00 it was raining heavily again, but by 6:00 the rain seemed to have blown over and it was actually looking quite sunny.  So I figured that a couple of hours float fishing on the Thames might be ok.

The river remains high and coloured but was definitely a little lower than yesterday - maybe an inch lower?  I planned to fish two swims not too far from where I park the car, so it wouldn't matter much if I struggled again.  So I was set up by about 6:30, as three swans made their way through my first swim and then had a chew at the tree at the top end.

At the end of last season I had taken some rather nice chub on float fished sweetcorn from this swim - the best being well over 5lbs.  My approach was to feed the inside line of the main flow crease on the assumption that some fish would be willing to feed on this line.  But an hour later, all I had to show for my efforts was a small roach of maybe 3oz. 

So down to swim number 2, which entails a short wade out through to the edge of the reeds, giving a nice trott down the main flow.  This spot was where I had filmed quite a few chub taking floating crust (what became the video "My Fishing Life 3").  So I was reasonably confident as I made my way slowly across the margins.  The extra water meant that getting to the river meant wading to thigh high, which was a bit awkward.  It was also actually quite cold.  But I stuck it out for 30 minutes without any bites at all.

Back to swim one, and a final 30 minutes during which I managed one tiny chub. 

I have been pondering on whether my fishing video series should include trips where I don't catch anything of particular interest.  Do I want the videos to accurately reflect my season - blanks and all - or do I want them to show my successes (which makes the videos more interesting of course).  At the moment, my plan is to produce videos where the footage looks ok, regardless of whether fish were caught or not.  Maybe two blanks in a row might be merged together into one film, or one of them just ignored.  Don't know yet. 

Anyway, I did knock out a short film of this trip, if only because I quite liked the footage of me wading in the river.  It can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvxHHNoZnSQ&feature=plcp

Thigh deep in the margins