With the Daily Mail announcing a mini Ice Age this morning in their own inimitable style it seems as good a time as any to post the story of my latest trip.
The 2nd of January, a dusting of snow on the ground and thoroughly Christmassed up to the eyeballs it was a relief to arrange a short trip to our old stomping ground on the river Leam at Hunningham with Phil.
Common sense should probably have prevailed but to be honest I haven't fished for ages and was keen to get out, a bit of cold weather wasn't going to stop me and Phil, well Phil's as daft as I am!
The river itself was more or less at normal Winter levels, very cold and the colour of tea; not ideal in my view especially with the likelihood of road salt, snow water and God knows what else running through but hey ho, fishing is fishing!
During our school years most Sundays from November to March were spent on this particular stretch and it is fair to say we knew it like the backs of our hands but how it's changed since then. Flood management by Severn Trent Water during the eighties meant that the Leam was kept free of obstructions, I remember in particular the ruthless pollarding programme which left the Willows at Offchurch little more than lifeless stumps and in the Hunningham area the banks were dug back with the use of a JCB into miles of steep, slippery bare earth, Fishery Management at its worst! Gladly it seems that the waterway hasn't been touched since and far from the relatively featureless stretch we fished as kids it has become a wilderness of fallen trees and rafts of debris with a likely fish holding feature in every swim.
Phil has stayed in touch with the fishing here by making an annual pilgrimage each Winter and he told me to forget about the big roach and sizable chub of old as the stretch now has a good head of small chub. The plan that had emerged during our earlier telephone conversation was to target chub with bread but to also have a dabble with lobworms to try for a big perch or two (they must be there somewhere), this plan was scuppered somewhat when Lanes didn't have any Lobs and we found ourselves sharing a tub of very sorry looking red worms produced by someone called Mr Worms (I suspect that's not his real name).
As things turned out the fishing was pretty much as dire as the weather, my main mistake was not listening to Phil's advice, I largely ignored the feature filled pegs and made a beeline for a long straight at the furthest end of the stretch, a straight of some three hundred yards in length with even flow and depth which comes off a sharp bend in the river, a straight which screams roach and, indeed, when I knew the river they were here in numbers and ranged from eight ounces to two pounds in weight but alas, as Phil had already warned, there were none to be found on this occasion.
While I stuck it out for my roach Phil was busy trying different swims (as I should have done) and was rewarded for his efforts with a solitary one pound chub.
Despite the disappointing result it was good to revisit the scene of so many good days, it was here I caught my first chub over three pounds and my first two pound roach, I even had a five pound bream on the last day of the season once and it was here we amused ourselves by building a fantastic snow man on a particularly slow Winters day, here where Phil was forced to swim to the bottom of the deepest hole to retrieve his umbrella on a windy March evening (how I laughed) and here where we were forced to smash holes in ice three inches thick in order to fish on what I would call a proper Winters day, probably during the last Ice Age.
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