“Feed them and you’ll catch them!” Martin Bowler takes us behind the scenes on his latest river adventure
As rivers clear of weed, shoals of hungry chevins become the target
LATE autumn and early winter can appear bleak at times, but at least rivers are no longer strangled by weed, and after rain they flow with a stronger pulse.
Now, with hiding places at a premium, specimen fish appear which were invisible to the angler during the summer – I’m always amazed at how they materialise at this time of year.
If the water is high and coloured then barbel are on my radar, but if that’s not the case there’s one species which stands
head and shoulders above the rest in terms of guaranteeing me some action.
The chub is an obliging fish with an eclectic taste in food. It soon adjusts to lower water temperatures, and even the coldest of nights won’t put it off seeking a meal for the whole of the following day. It might take patience, but keep teasing them and a bite will surely come.
On the bait front, maggots are probably your best friend. Of course, in angling nothing is set in stone, and the river does need a degree of clarity for them to work. The only other drawback is that you may still be pestered by bait-robbing minnows, but that aside, I’ve never met a chub that can ignore a grub!
The trick is to feed little-and-often, and rarely do I cast out until the half-hour mark of my session, before which a constant stream of maggots has been going into the swim.
Correct feeding and being
patient are the most important elements to success. Sure, you can catch one chub quickly, but get the whole shoal addicted and the disturbance of hooking a fish will not put the rest of them off.
The best scenario possible is to feed for a good length of time and then get a bite in the first few trots. On landing your chub, a glance down its throat will hopefully reveal very few maggots. You’d think you’d want to see loads of them chewed up, indicating confident feeding, but that early dip of the float has already told you that, and now the lack of maggots on display tells you that there’s competition between fish, with the likelihood of a big shoal being present.
If I feed for half-an-hour and then run the float through a dozen times without a bite I’ll move and repeat the process. That might seem like a waste of bait, but time is very valuable to me and a few pints of maggots is a small price to pay to discover whether I’m wasting my time.
Once I’ve got a chub shoal feeding hard I turn to my choice of tackle. You just can’t beat a 14ft or 15ft Drennan Acolyte Plus rod for this style of fishing. Team it with a good fixed-spool reel and 4.4lb Floatfish line, heavily treated to make it buoyant, and you have a great combination.
I don’t need much else, and carry rig bits in a single small tackle bag. Once the chub are feeding there’s nothing complicated about catching them. An Avon or Loafer is the float of choice, and the key here is to use something big enough to take charge of the trot and not let the river have its own way.
Hook choice depends on how close the snags are, either the incredibly robust size 18 Super Spade to a 4lb bottom or an 18 Red Maggot to 3lb, both perfect with balanced tackle to land even 6lb-plus chub.
A size 18 barrel swivel connects the hook and mainline and prevents twist – far better, I find, than a traditional loop-to-loop approach.
Finally, nine times out of 10 the shotting pattern is to bulk-shot at three-quarter depth and add a couple of droppers. I also place a No6 or No4 directly under the float so, should the silicone slip, I haven’t lost the depth at which I’m fishing.
With chub I can’t stress how important your initial feeding is, and that was the approach I took when fishing the Avon for a couple of days.
Initially I was out of touch with the river, and three times I fed and wasn’t rewarded.
“A big pigeon-chested chub tried to find a weakness in my tackle”
A frustrating start, especially with such short days, and only when the sun began to sink and the clouds turned inky black with approaching rain did the rod bend to the will of a chub.
Shortly after that, though, the fish came adrift, sending the rest of the shoal into a panic. One of the reasons I never fish lighter is the damage a loss can do to my prospects, but there’s nothing I can do about a hook-pull.
With night fast approaching I didn’t have enough time to save the situation and rebuild the chub’s confidence. On the positive side of things, I knew exactly where to look for the shoal when I returned.
Life got in the way on day two and I didn’t get to the bank until late afternoon. No matter, as in the drizzle I was certain my maggots were passing plenty of hungry white mouths.
The chub had completely forgotten yesterday’s disturbance, and each pouchful of grubs saw another fish move upstream and weave across the flow to intercept the food. By the time 30 minutes had passed all my hard work was done and bites were now a certainty. As long as I kept feeding in maggots, little else mattered, indeed success came with the first trot. A big pigeon-chested chub tried to find a weakness in my tackle, but I knew it couldn’t and so I took the liberty of feeding again midway through the fight.
The moment the chub was in the net I used the catapult again and this sequence was repeated for the next three hours.
The chub were clearly satisfied, and so was I – at times like these I celebrate the short, cold days leading into winter.