Colin’s report

So, it was late afternoon, I’d spent the day fishing the lake at the Bridge Inn, Lenwade and was packing up and heading back to the car, and as usual I thought to have a quick look at the river stretch as I had some leftover bread and see if chucking a few bits in would give me any signs of life from the snags/hidey holes the chub live in.

I walked a fair stretch of the river and caught up with most of my bread coming downstream. Unbelievably I saw a shoal of roach taking the slow sinking bread and a few actually coming up to take pieces off the surface, so I quickly rushed back to the car and grabbed a rod and net and got back to the roach.

At this point a couple of visitors to the river stretch had seen me running up and down and came over to see what I was up to! I gave them the quick introduction and kept feeding the swim, watching the fish getting more competitive and taking the bread. I tied a simple hook and freelined the bread through the swim a couple of times and had no takes. We could see the fish were there but somehow I just couldn’t get the bread to run through how they wanted it. So, with a bit of encouragement from my now audience I wet the bread a bit more, went for a slow sinking approach and cast further upstream really giving it time to bounce along through the swim in front of the fish.

Sure enough the roach were on it and I struck into my first fish, a good size just over a 1lb and carefully played him into the net without causing too much commotion. Unhooked the fish, had a quick look and decided there was definitely a better fish to have as we’d seen quite a few larger ones by this point. So, rinse and repeat; kept feeding bread and then trotted our slow sinking bread flake through again. This time the biggest of the shoal came straight onto it as it passed in front of them. Struck, hooked and gently played him in. Once I had netted the fish we had a small cheer and we were all quite chuffed that I’d managed to single out the best of the fish. The two guests kindly took some photos for me and then we released him. We chatted for a bit and parted ways, a chance encounter and a wonderful thing to have shared with a couple of other anglers.