Telling's Times: River Thames

Sunday, 30 September 2012

River Thames - Clifton Hampden

Peg 14
3lb 9oz
No good
28 fished

Twenty eight anglers fished the practice open ready for next weeks Angling Trust winter league. The river was up and moving, with slight tinge of colour, but it was pushing maybe too hard and only 5ft deep. The problem is that everything will get washed away or hopefully eaten by 20lb of roach waiting for me?!

No one had fished Clifton Hampden for a while and therefore no one knew how it was going to fish. So postive approach was applied, planned to feed as much groundbait needed, I carried two buckets full and there was a field of mole hill soil, which I took about 2kg mole hill to add to my 4kg of my ready mixed groundbait (had about 10kg's dry). So put 8 big soild balls of groundbait in, then would top it up at least every twenty minutes or when required if the fish were really having it. However, this wasn't the case, 6 roach in the first forty minutes wasn't good and tried the bolo over the top and run it right down the bottom of the peg which result in a bleak....... So balled it again to try and get a responsed, which resulted in a couple of tiny roach and bleak. But felt that I would have to hit it everytime to catch a few fish, and this wasn't going to do any good, as this wasn't a team event and therfore decided to fish my 50gram feeder to the far bank and hope to cacth some bream or chub. Nope, this didn't happen and only caught 1 small chub and a couple of real tiny "puppies". So was disappointed with 3lb 9oz. In reflection i should only fished the pole for 40 minutes to catch a few quick fish and then fished a bolo down the middle and a feeder over the top, also a maggot feeder to the far bank.