Long sessions are O

Long sessions are O-U-T! and anything entailing more than a few stolen hours here and there needs rigorous planning and a little deceit “Honest kids, I have to go, it’s business!”. Suddenly it seems that fishing.co.uk has lifted a lot of my free time from me and the time I would have spent on a bankside somewhere has been replaced by sessions in front of a computer screen. My long stay catfishing days seem to be out for the foreseeable future and I have realised that a different approach to my fishing is needed.The only way to go is travelling light. The big rod bag with it’s pods, bivvy and bedchair now sits gathering dust. That bulk bag of boiled baits get harder and harder – still, they’ll be useful next time I get out to fish those French waters. I never could seem to get hard enough baits, now I have hundreds of them in a large ratproof tin box. What? You think you don’t need one? I read somewhere that there is a rat within ten foot of almost everyone living in the London area – and I don’t mean estate agents either. Yuk!So – short sessions In the last couple of weeks I managed two short sessions on the river Kennet and a couple of jaunts around some local lakes looking for carp which were surface feeding. Well, they decided that they never wanted to play ball so I can’t claim any victories there. The river trips were a bit more profitable. Having spent the last few months eagerly awaiting the chance to fish a river again I took off to the Kennet for my first river session of the season in the fishing.co.uk Land Rover. Ahah! The rutted track that gets me down to the river was beaten at last. I trimmed 5 minutes off my previous best journey down the track warts and bumps and bogs an’ all.All I take on these trips is two rods, two banksticks, a landing net and a brolly . A comfortable chair (more comfortable since I started using the unhooking mat as a cushion) a bag for sandwiches and some bait. The meagre amount of end tackle I’ll need is in a small Tupperware box which fits in my pocket. Probably the heaviest thing I’ll have with me is a flask of coffee, but at this time of year I don’t even bother with that. A small bottle of Coke is sufficient. Even this small amount of tackle can get heavy after walking across a muddy field but if I take anything less I always regret it. So, back to the plotI set up behind a thick screen of rushes, staying low so that I wasn’t silhouetted against the sky. It stays light for so long on these summer evenings – even at 9pm it was still light enough to spook a fish by standing against the skyline. I only had a couple of hours, so rather than overbait the swim I introduced a couple of handfuls of a quick melting pellet. The small pellet s are better for this than the big ones as they tend to take up to a couple of hours to beak down. With the flavour in the swim I was confident that the chub and barbel would start searching around for bigger pieces of the same food. They did too, I wasn’t disappointed. Now, notice that I say ‘flavour’ and not ‘smell’. I know that there is a close similarity between the taste buds and the olfactory senses but it still gets me when I hear people talking about the ‘smell’ of a bait. Humans live in a gaseous environment and therefor we use our nostrils to sense over distance, and taste only when we have the food in our mouths. Fish work in a different way. They live in liquid and therefor, it seems obvious to me, that to them taste will be more important in sensing food at a distance than smell. Not important you may think – well perhaps someday you may visit a tropical country and sample the durian fruit. This stuff tastes delicious. But it smells like Paul Garners socks after a three day session. Really, it does. The bloke who first discovered how nice durian tasted must have been extremely hungry! Anyway, concerning bait, I think it’s important to differentiate between taste and smell, ‘nuff said.Half an hour into the session the rod tip whacked around and I was into a hard fighting chub that took longer to subdue than I would have expected at this time of year. I really thought I had a barbel on. It just wouldn’t give up and made a lot more disturbance than I would have liked on this narrow stretch of water. At last it was in the net. Up on the scales it weighed in at a little over 5lb, a monster for some rivers but not much more than average for this stretch. Another handful of pellet and after re-baiting both rods I recast. Nothing. The river had become seemingly void of fish – probably due to the commotion I had made landing the chub. The minutes turned into hours and I was almost ready to go home. I reeled in the left hand rod and was re-baiting it for ‘one last cast’ when a slight twitch on the right hand rod continued and developed into a ‘proper’ barbel bite. The rod-tip, aimed up into the sky for bite detection, swooped down in a flying arc. Thank God for those John Roberts butt-grips or I might have lost the rod. Wow, the power of this fish was something else. I really did think that I had a super-double on, as most barbel in this stretch don’t usually fight quite that hard, but I was wrong. Up on the scales she pulled the needle around to 8lb 8ozs. A great result and a good end to a good, but all too short session.

A week later I was back fishing the same stretch but in a swim a fair bit downstream of where the last weeks fish had been taken. When I had packed up last week I had walked the whole stretch introducing the odd handful of bait here and there. The point was just to make sure that wherever I chose to fish next time, the bait would have been to some extent established as a food that the barbel would recognise. The whole of the previous week had been glorious weather and then, yesterday, the temperature had dropped right down and freezing rain had poured down from the skies. The fish were sulking as a result. I fished for four hours with nothing but the odd line-bite or bat moving the rod-tip. Then, again as I was packing up, a barbel bite startled the life out of me and so I broke my duck. (Shame really, I quite liked that duck!). It turned out to be the only fish of the session but at around 7lb it was not one of the monsters that we sometimes encounter around here. I photographed, but did not weigh the fish and as a light rain started to fall I eased her back into the river. The walk back across the field s was in a howling, rainy gale but the warm glow from the capture of that bar of gold made me oblivious to it. An hour or so later I was snug in my bed and smiling at the thought of the carp-anglers out there freezing the night away. Yeah, I like short sessions.