The season so far . . .

Well the current river fishing season is now just over five weeks old and I have had one of the poorest starts to a season that I have ever had.  It had been even worse than five or six years ago when there were also really bad floods at the start of the season.  But that year I was usually able to catch one or two chub each trip - now I am not even getting that.

All sorts of reasons have gone through my mind, from the idea that maybe the fish hadn't spawned and were all holed up on some gravel shallows somewhere, to the idea that maybe my filming of trips is somehow to blame - perhaps I disturb the fish setting up the tripod, perhaps I fish in a more anxious, less-patient way as I am being filmed . . . .

One possible issue is that I am mainly fishing for chub.  Barbel would be a better principal target perhaps, but numbers are so low on the Upper Thames that deliberately fishing for them is almost bound to lead to long sequences of blanks anyway.

So what is my current plan?  Well I went for a walk at the river on Saturday morning and remarkably, the river is higher again.  It had possibly peaked a little bit higher still (though the evidence for this was rather patchy).  But as I write this, we have had 3 days without rain and no rain is forecast for the next few days.  So tomorrow I will pop to the river first thing and assess the level yet again.  If it is down again (as I'm pretty sure it will be), I will have a trip on Tuesday afternoon / evening.  This will be a multi-swim bait and fish in rotation plan, with sweetcorn or boilies as the bait.  Then I might go early on Wednesday or Thursday morning for a couple of hours float fishing.

If the river is no lower, this plan will be moved back to Thursday evening. 

One other point - I do think that I ought to fish a bit longer than I have been each trip.  I have been tending to go for just a couple of hours.  This should go up to sessions of four or five hours I think.

And venues?  For the moment I will stick to the local stretches of the River Thames - at least I dodn't have to travel far to get to these spots.  But when conditions do improve I am thinking of having a few trips to the Thames at Northmoor weir.  Or maybe the Pickfords stretch.