Winter fishing madness

The internet weather service I follow says that the temperature in our area of rural Oxfordshire fell to -10C overnight. By 8:00am, it had risen to -7C. It might be thought that this would be enough to persuade me to not go fishing. But given the right clothing and the closeness of the venue, it didn't seem a bad idea to me and I set off down about 2:00pm aiming to fish till about 5:30, my planned limit in the sub-zero conditions. That said, I did decide to fish the spots nearest the car, rather than walk the extra 1/2 miles and fish the three or four deeper spots before the weir that I am really keen to visit again.

The river had dropped another inch or so and the colour of the last week or so has now more or less gone from it. This means that the lower raft swim at the end of the big crease has been revealed to be actually quite shallow, maybe only 2 foot deep now. There are still spots in it where you can see that chub could hole up, but it seems a less likely spot than it was with a bit of colour.

So my focus is the long crease swim, where the depth is around 4-5 foot. A 1/2 to 3/4 oz weight is required to search the different areas of the swim correctly, and I was rather pleased with the methodical way in which I set about this. And after about 30mins, in a spot downstream of my fishing position, and just inside the main line of the crease, I had a couple of sharp pings in the quivertip, a brief slackening of the line, then a strong pull and the connection with a decent fish. The deep fight suggested it might be a very good fish, but it then just gave up the fight and it turned out to be another really nice 4lber, 4-08 to be exact.

This turned out to be the only fish of the afternoon. No bites in the raft swim at the end, possibly one other in the crease swim. I blame a jogger (!!) who ran past me about 4:00, clumping away on the hard ground and possibly spooking the fish.


A nice plump 4-08 chub