The River Angler

The call of the mighty Trent was too strong to ignore and so Geoff and I made arrangements to do a couple of nights.  It’s a bit of a trek from Kent but the rewards and scenery well make up for the distance.  As always we got to see plenty of Goldfinches which just add some really rich and vibrant colour as they dart about, resplendent in their gold plumage.

Goldfinch

Whenever I think of Nottingham, it always reminds me of that great line from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves when the Sheriff of Nottingham (played by the brilliant actor Alan Rickman) says to a young wench “You. My room. 10:30 tonight.” and immediately follows it up to another young wench with “You. 10:45… And bring a friend.”  Brilliant.

The weather forecast was (not surprisingly) mixed; sunny period interspersed with some heavy rain and thunder storms.  That pretty much summed up the whole of the summer so far.  Still undeterred by such things we arrived at the river early evening on the Tuesday.  She was carrying about 3 foot of extra water and looked really good.  We headed upstream and settled on a couple of swims.  After a few bite less hours in what looked a perfect spot, I decided to move lower downstream.  Geoff hadn’t had a bite either and we really couldn’t understand what we were doing wrong.   Just before packing up around 1am my rod finally slammed over and a small barbel of about 5lb was returned safely to fight another day.

So 1 barbel between the two of us was pretty appalling and we both felt rather inadequate.  Quite what we were doing wrong wasn’t glaringly obvious to us, other than maybe we hadn’t found the fish.   So Wednesday we returned after enjoying a rather hearty breakfast at the local farm shop, which had a superb cafe.  This time we opted to fish a little lower down.  I found a few fish, taking four during the afternoon and I moved lower down again early evening and managed a further two from close in on very small pellets.  Six was certainly better than yesterday but far from good.  Geoff still hadn’t managed a fish.

As darkness fell I got chatting to one of the locals who pointed out the error of our ways.  During high water the barbel shoaled up lower downstream leaving much of the upper stretches devoid of fish.  He proved himself right by fishing the evening and catching over 30 barbel.  We decided to try a couple of swims lower down and Geoff managed four and I had three more.

A lesson learned as they say.

The next morning the heavens opened and we had to pack away the tents in heavy rain.  We couldn’t even have an early morning cuppa.  So this is what Hell’s like then…..bugger!