This is Ashford Road

Location: From Sunbury Cross at the end of the A316 follow the A308 towards Staines. After passing the Queen Mary Reservoir on your left hand side you will come into a roundabout. Turn left at this roundabout and left again at the next roundabout that is about 200 yards away. This is Ashford Road. Follow the road through Laleham Village going straight on at the roundabout. After a sharp turn to your left, turn right down Ferry Lane. This will take you into Thames Side, a road on the side of the Thames with several free car parks. The section extends as far as the bottom of Penton Hook Island upstream down to the Chertsey road-bridge.The venue; In all there is nearly two miles of free fishing. Although I use the word ‘free’ you still need the Environment Agency license to fish anywhere in the country and here is no exception. There is about a mile and a quarter of bank downstream of where Ferry Lane joins Thames Side and three quarters of a mile upstream. For convenience, most anglers concentrate on the downstream section.Fishing; As with most venues what you actually catch will to some extent depend on the bait and tactics used.Several years ago, I joined Roger Baker and his son, Paul for a session on the upper section. They had been using hemp and tares to catch some good bags of roach. They would regularly catch bags of up to nearly thirty pounds of roach in a short evening session after work. Several of the roach would be over the pound mark which made this, by any standards, good Thames fishing.When I joined them, they lent me a pole to fish at 8 metres out with a pole float holding the equivalent of six number 4 shot. However they used tungsten olivettes instead of shot to stop the fish taking the shot, as they can mistake shot for hemp. As bait I was given less than a pint of hemp with a handfull of cooked tares. I just fed in a few grains of hemp on every cast and trotted my float through the swim at depth with a tare on a size 14 hook. The results were remarkable. I was soon regularly catching roach with the odd dace. It was one of those rare occasions. I was using, what was for me, different tackle, as I am not a pole angler and catching well. At the end of that short, three hour session Roger had done the best with just over 241b of fish whilst, as expected I had done the worse – but I still had a catch of over 151b! This is, in Summer, a section to remember for fishing with hemp and tares for roach and dace.I also noticed that pike were fairly active taking the odd fish off of the hook. I returned later in the year to try for the pike using conventional pike fishing tactics. I was surprised at the number of pike I caught, including some very big doubles. This is certainly a section worth pike fishing.There are shoals of bream and chub that are often caught using a swim feeder across the river, to fish by the house-boats. This is a long chuck so it is advisable to use a powerful feeder rod to make the distance. However the rewards can be great as it is possible, if the bream are located, to catch over 1001b in a session. The chub are also worth searching out as they can be very big. I remember reading about a 71b 2oz chub being caught here in a match. Naturally I thought that it was a case of mistaken identity and the fish was in fact a common carp. I was wrong as, when I checked with local match angler, Paul Lancaster, he confirmed that it was a monster chub and not a carp.The carp on this section are becoming very popular. I counted 12 anglers one Summer evening on the section. Nine of these were set up with optonics and traditional carp tactics. There is a good head of carp in this section with both mirrors and commons to over thirty pounds. I have prebaited heavily with trout pellet to catch more than my fair share of carp before the bream moved in. I did however catch a couple of barbel in with the bream.This is a good section which, I believe, has something to offer most anglers, certainly worth fishing!