Billy's Fishing Blog » Billys Blog March 12th

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Welcome to my fishing blog… March 2023

March 12th – River Avon, Chequers, Hanham – The Bream Pipe Dream

The last club match of the river season was held on the Chequers stretch of the Bristol Avon and a bream fest it certainly wasn’t. A couple of weeks ago, we had heard of some 100 lb weights coming off this stretch but that was before the rain came and then the snow and then more rain. That said, we were all still kind of hoping they would show up, and so with that in mind it was an all-out bream attack. There were also a few other good reasons for deciding on the bream or bust option, not least the pairs challenge, the knockout competition and winning the match itself.

The river that greeted us in the morning was an angry brown colour and it was flowing like a stampede of horses. (Actually, there were several horses in the field behind us and they were stampeding on and off all through the day.) The river was also boiling like Old Mother Hubbard’s cauldron and there was rubbish coming downstream, albeit most of it was out in the main flow. I didn’t think that there had been that much rain over the past few days but there was of course all that snow, which had now melted and together with weeks of rock salt spreading, it was all coming into the river.

Still, it was going to be the same for everyone so no real complaints all round. Jason, our match secretary had put 7 pegs on the straight and 2 well above. Anywhere on the straight would be favourite today even considering the conditions. Peg 1 was probably the best peg to draw, in light of some big weights recently. However, I drew peg 2. There was a tree lying in the water on this peg, up to about a third of the way across but some slack in front of it so this would be the area I would target first.

I only set up one rod for the job and with several feeder sizes on standby, I first opted for a 25-gram cage feeder. Groundbait today was Sonubaits So Natural Black Bream and pure brown crumb, mixed fifty-fifty. I added some pinkles, a few maggles and some casters to the mix. I had worms and bread as backup baits. On the all-in, I dropped the feeder about a metre from the inside bank just to my right. Nothing there and so I dropped it in to my left and found nothing there either. Each subsequent cast was a little further out until I hit a nasty snag.

One feeder and hook were lost on this snag but after resetting and dropping the feeder out another metre I located a roach of about 4 ounces. But, as I reached for the landing net it came off… FFS! I dropped the feeder in exactly the same spot and after 2 more casts I had another roach on only for the same thing to happen. A quick inspection of the hook revealed I had put on a barbless hook, which you really can’t do on a river, especially in a match. A quick change to a size 16 micro-barb and 10 minutes later my first fish was in the net.

Although I was off the mark, roach were not the intended quarry today but it had snaffled my 3 red maggle hookbait and so became a welcome and justifiable POW. I started casting around the slackish area to see if I could locate any slabs but all I was catching were snags. Another feeder was lost and 2 more hooks quickly followed. At one point, I thought I had hooked into a really big bream because as I pulled, it was pulling back. When I eased off the pressure it was juddering and pulling but as my excitement gradually died down, I realised it was a rather springy tree branch and so another hook was lost.

I changed to a 35-gram open-ended feeder and lobbed the rig out into the middle where the water was pushing hard. The intention was to clear the snaggy area and hope that the feeder would land just beyond the sunken parts of the tree. I also started ringing the changes with baits. Double red maggle, triple red, red and white, white and bronze, red and bronze, maggle and pinkle, 3 pinkles, worm and maggle, worm and pinkle, worm and caster, worm on its own and even bread… the lot! I changed feeder sizes several times and I lost a couple more hooks on snags.

It was going well… wasn’t it! 🙂

I caught a couple more roach and I missed many quick, “tap-tap” roach bites but there were no bream. There were no indications of bream either, like liners or dropbacks. To my left was Leigh Wakefield who was simply lobbing his feeder out into the middle and letting it pull round to rest in the slacker water. He had managed to find 3 bream doing this. As I had been doing the same for a couple of hours I couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong. Jason was walking the bank, having not had a bite. He went up to see Kev Murch on peg one, only to find that Kev was struggling too. However, in the last hour, Jason had hooked and landed the biggest fish of the day, a 5lb plus bream. His only fish.

Meanwhile, Ian Swanborough on peg 8 also had a bream, a smallish 3-pounder. Everyone else had ounces or no bites at all. Needless to say, Leigh’s 3 bream were enough to win the day. Jason’s one proper slab was enough for second place and Ian’s 3-pounder won him third place and the knockout trophy. He also won the pairs aggregate together with his partner, Ian Brice, plus he came out on top of the individual aggregate too, making it a memorable day for him. For the rest of us though, it was more of a day to forget.

We all know that fishing can be very unpredictable and sometimes no matter what you do, you will not get a bite or you will struggle to keep fish in front of you or even find them. It’s this unpredictability that compels us to keep trying, regardless of past successes or failures. In my blog posts, I tell it as it is and as it happens. If I were to only report on my successes then that wouldn’t reveal the bigger picture. We all know we have to learn from our failures and mistakes, and you never stop learning in this business. That’s what makes it so interesting.

Well, onwards and upwards… I have a choice of 2 open matches next weekend. One is on Bitterwell Lake on Saturday 18^th, and the other is on Windmill Fishery Match Lake on Sunday 19^th. Now, which one should I go for? Stay tuned to find out which one I chose and how I fared.

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