I'm Rob Kavanagh, your Artful Angler artist and dedicated angler.
My fishing blog is here to share my fishing adventures, ideas, stories, tips, anecdotes, techniques etc.. tight lines!
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28/01/2008
Local Roach Hunt
27th January 2008
A gloriously sunny morning greeted me, and with the manky finger well again, a spot of fishing was in order!
Just after Chistmas I'd had a lenghty chat with an angler on the lower reaches of my local Frome about its potential for big roach. He reckoned that the section several miles upstream around Ryeford and Kings Stanley were the areas to target, as he and a couple of his pals had regularly caught roach over 1lb from that stretch a few seasons ago.
I headed off to my starting point intending to quivertip in some swims and trot in others. For bait I took along red maggots, worms and bread, with a bit of mashed bread as groundbait.
The first swim I wanted to fish was the tail end of a weirpool. The river forks down two weirs forming different pools before continuing on different paths seperated at first by a sharp peninsula. It was the larger of these that I would start in. I'd never caught much from it in the past other that the usual 6" brownies, although on our last trip there, Matt caught a succession of small roach.
Getting there at all proved tricky though as the path obviously hasn't seen much use recently allowing the brambles to run amok. As soon as I was though the thorny stuff I came across the first of two large fallen trees efficiently blocking the way. By the time I'd got under one and over the other into more open ground I was puffing like a train. No wonder no-one comes this way anymore!
The river levels have dropped back to normal and carried just a hint of colour, not two weeks ago the nearby (and several feet higher) bypass was flooded by this little river. The air was surprisingly mild and the sun shone warmly, with no breeze at all. Not a hint of rain.
I was soon set up and fishing, although casting was proving frustrating as a knot in the line kept snagging, limiting casting range, and occasionally sending the tackle into an overhanging tree... It practically ruled out trotting as the line just wouldn't peel smoothly off the spool, no matter what I tried to do to fix it. I concentrated on fishing a wide slack just downstream, and had a couple of sharp rattles on the tip that I couldn't connect with on double-maggot. Shortly I hooked one of the dinky little trout this river is full of and decided to move on.
I had one good tap on the breadflake in the smaller pool, but after a further hour or so trying to trot a couple of steady glides with maggots and worm without result, I called it a day and set about finding a less gymnastic route back out of the undergrowth!
