Seven Heaven for Dave Harrell
My childhood dream becomes a reality...
WHEN I was a teenager, my dad used to take me to some lovely stretches of the River Severn – and getting to these venues involved driving over the river bridge at Bridgnorth in Shropshire.
There was a swim immediately below the bridge that I always wanted to fish.
We never did. I think the place was a bit too busy for my dad, with traffic on the bridge and people walking on the path behind the swim. My dad preferred quieter places so we’d always end up lower down the river.
Anyway, all these years later I finally got the chance after a conversation with local tackle dealer, Chris Holmes. I asked him about the swim that I’d always wanted to fish and we arranged to have a few hours fishing it together.
Would the swim be as good as I always dreamt it would be? It would be a huge disappointment if it didn’t produce after waiting so long…
HOW THE SESSION WENT
After getting all the gear down and into the river, the first job was get comfortable on my Riggers platform. A barrow/platform is essential for river fishing, in my opinion – for getting to your swim, positioning your box comfortably or even just using as a bait table. With brackets fitted to the legs you can attach a keepnet or feeder arm and everything is always to hand.
For bait, I’d got two pints of casters, a large tin of Bait-Tech hemp and three pints of superb bronze maggots from Lanes in Coventry.
Before I set up a rig, I attached a small dumpy waggler to the line, with rubbers at the top and bottom, and then tied a 2oz plummet to the end of the line. This was used to plumb the depth and I was pleased to find around 5ft of water.
It was always going to be a waggler job as all the main flow was well out, so I set up 3SSG and 4SSG Insert Truncheon floats with most of the weight locking the float on to the line and three No4 shot down the 6lb (0.20mm) Pro Match line. I also built in three spare No4s with the locking shots, as these would give me options if I wanted to put more shot down the line.
I set the rig at 5ft but, before we started, I fired four pouchfuls of casters and hemp as far as I could get them and then I loaded three maggots on to a size 14 hook. The current was all over the place, but there was a band of water all going the same way in mid-river and this would be where we would concentrate our efforts. A floating line was important, as we’d have to mend the line a few times to keep a straight line to the float.
First cast, the float travelled a long way down the swim before dragging under so I put a few more inches on to the depth. Second cast and the float travelled a short distance down the swim before burying and I struck into our first fish of the day, a chub of nearly 3lb! It felt so good sliding the net under this fish – I had waited a very long time to catch one from this swim! Next cast, a 1lb chub took a liking to the three maggots. We were up and running!
A GREAT AFTERNOON
I passed the rod to Chris and he added more chub to the net
before we started to be plagued by small dace. We changed the hook to a size 12 with four maggots and, while the small-fish activity continued for a while, we eventually managed to feed them off and continued to catch chub.
I felt sure that there would be some barbel in the swim too but, try as we might, we couldn’t get one. We did see a couple of small ones jump out, so there were some there but not feeding.
We finished our session with 21 chub for 25lb. Add around 6lb of dace, which we threw back as we caught them, and it was a great afternoon’s fishing. If my dad was looking down I’m sure he’d have been laughing as we tried in vain to catch them in mid-flight!
This was a very special day for me, and my personal thanks to Chris for his help. My childhood dream had become a reality.