In my last fishing post I was telling my readers about the old angler who was fishing for chub in the river sow about half a mile below Great Bridgeford. I'd fished this stretch of river many times when I was a teenager, but hadn't caught much except the odd kamikaze perch. The picture below was taken when I was a comparative youngster..
Anyway, I was interested to see if this chap was catching anything, so I crouched in low and sat quietly alongside him while he showed me what he was doing. The actual place he had picked to fish was very important. It was on the outside of a bend where the river was deeper than average. However, the most important thing was that there was a bush growing out of the bank and that it was causing an obstruction. This meant that all the bits of weed and twigs that came floating down the river got caught up in the branches of the bush. Overtime, the bush had trapped quite a lot of rubbish and a raft of bits and pieces had built up in front of it. This, the old angler assured me, was the perfect place for big chub.
His tackle was simple: 5lb line, stickfloat, which was set slightly over depth, and an AA shot about a foot from a size ten hook. Then he showed me his secret weapon; a big lump of cheddar cheese. According to him chub can't resist cheese and cheddar is the right consistency for putting the hook. Anyway he moulded a lump around his hook and then cast it out gently so that it landed level with the bush, out in the mid stream. Then he slowly reeled the line back upstream, so that his terminal tackle went under the floating raft of debris, while his float came to the front edge of the raft so that it could be easily seen.
I'd never seen anybody put so much thought into applying the right method to suit the species and the conditions. So I wasn't at all surprised when a few minutes later his float disappeared and he was bending into a good chub. And bend into it he did, he wouldn't let the fish have an inch of line. I guess I would have let the fish have a little line, but he said if he did that the fish would either go downstream and spook the rest of the shoal or bolt into the branches of the tree and snag his line. So he bent into the chub for all he was worth and made the rod do the job it was made for.
A few minutes later we were standing in the field, several yards away from the water, looking at a chub that weighed about three pounds. This was was one of the nicest fish I have ever seen, big and clean with large, nicely formed scales. The chub is a very handsome fish of perfect proportion, so that is one of the reasons why the chub hits my number two spot.
My father had introduced me to angling, and from that day I realised that his chuck it and chance it method left a lot to be desired. The old angler that I watched catching chub in the river Sow was a complete contrast and he taught me to think more about the species and the condition when fishing, and what methods would be most likely to succeed.
I regularly used the tactics he'd shown me to catch some specimen chub of my own. I also believe that one of the reason that I did so well during my match fishing career was because the old chap had got me thinking. My success might have only been local, but I did win a hell of a lot of trophies. I can be seen in the photo on the left modestly picking up another bit of silverware
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