One of 3 doubles in an afternoon when we got the timing right !

Through one thing and another I have not been able to get out fishing much lately and so last weeks trip to the Warwickshire Avon was my first session for nearly three weeks.

The river was about a foot above normal level and carrying a nice brown tinge to it. My only concern was that we may be a day late, has the river had dropped at least 2 ½ feet from the previous day and there would be a good chance that the barbel had fed hard with the extra water on. This proved to be the case, as myself and my good mate Geoff struggled for one barbel each.

These were fish of about 7 ½ to 8 ½ pounds and were‘as fat as butter’ thus proving that we had missed the real feeding spell by about 24 hours. As in all types of fishing, timing really is the key to successful winter barbel fishing! Working full time you have to get out whilst you can and therefore you can’t always be there at the optimum times. Apart from a couple of small chub these were the only bites of the day.
 
Because I hadn’t been out for a while it really was nice just being there (sometimes when you are fishing a lot, I believe you can take it for granted and just go through the motions). We were the only anglers on the bank on a pleasantly mild day of about 10 degrees Centigrade.
 

The weir the ’salmon’ tried to negotiate

Anyway I have waffled on long enough, the real reason for this blog article was to relay something that happened which I have not seen before. At around 2pm I saw what I am pretty certain was a Salmon of about 5 or 6lbs leap twice to try and get up the weir. Now we have all seen this sort of thing on Television but I had never seen it in the wild. What made it even more special was the fact that I didn’t think that the Warwickshire Avon held Salmon. I have seen Salmon ‘run’ in the Wye and the Severn but never so much has a sign of them before in the Avon. Sometimes the things that you see whilst you are on the bank are so much more interesting than just the fishing part of the sport.

Has the Avon joins the Severn at Tewkesbury it could have been a fish that came in from the Severn. I would be really interested to know if anyone else has heard of or seen Salmon whilst on the Warwickshire Avon ?
Cheers, Pat

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