Charman’s Challenge – R Loddon
Stanford End.
Date – Friday 25th
July 2014
Venue fact file –
River Loddon, Stanford End Farm, RG7
1SY.
Season Tickets - Adult £94-00
with a one of £25 joining fee. Concessions for OAP, disabled and
juniors. Available from The Creel, Aldershot 01252 320871.
Stock – Predominantly barbel
and chub with most other river species including quality perch and
occasional big rainbow and brown trout.
Conditions – As difficult as
it gets with atmospheric pressure reading 1022mb, cloudless blue
skies and temperatures soaring into the high twenties coupled with a
low and gin clear river.
Arriving at 7am
the early season session (I don’t really start thinking about
barbel until September) was to meet up with a customer that had
booked me last year in an attempt to catch his first barbel.
Conditions on the day were diabolical and although we fished hard all
day just one chub fell. It was as if Lee was destined not to catch as
today was even worse yet as they say you’re not going to catch
sitting at home and with just one other angler on the stretch we
headed out into the countryside full of hope.
I decided to stick
to the top field and leave Lee to work his way through the bottom two
fields, areas that I feel are far better for barbel. Hopefully the
other angler would be a static one, leaving a few swims to have
settled over night, yet unfortunately he wasn’t as it was another
of my customers, Mark who knows only too well that moving around
bought with it a far better chance of catching.
The first swim I
dropped into was what I call a banker swim, often saving a blank on a
hard day even if its usually from a modest chub or as I found out a
couple of weeks earlier a monstrous rainbow trout that had found its
way down stream from the Dukes trout beat further upstream. Amazingly
apart from one small pluck the swim seemed devoid of fish so I
decided to bait a few spots with some 6mm pellets and rotate these
every fifteen minutes or so. The reason the banker swim had failed to
catch, as I later found out was that Mark had already fished it
proving that unless you are the first angler in the swim then you’re
up against it.
The pellet-lead
has become so over used that I have been trying something different,
encapsulating my pellet in a ball of smaller samples made possible
with the new Nash Deliverance Ballmaker. It had shown its
effectiveness during a couple of FAS barbel teach-ins so I was full
of expectations, yet as the morning progressed and with the sun high
and temperatures on the rise I started to feel somewhat deflated.
Its at times like
this that you have to try a think like a fish and ask yourself, where
would I go in such conditions and just like myself it had to be out
of the sun so l started to look for shaded areas with cover and soon
after flicking my bait into position the rod bent round. In fact I
don’t think the bait hit bottom as I was taken by surprised,
initially thinking, my god the currents stronger than I expected
here, yet it was from a chub weighing around 4lb. I spent the last
hour bumping a pellet around the bridge pool without success and with
no call from Lee expected him to return home fishless. I decided to
call it a day at midday however Lee stayed on a couple of extra hours
and took my advise to find shelter from some trees, one that shadowed
the river from the sun and later that day called to say that he had
landed his first ever barbel, one weighing 5lb 15oz.
I have to admit
that my love for the Loddon has been dwindling over the last few
years as most stretches, especially Stanford End have seen a dramatic
drop in the numbers of, not just barbel but chub and unless immediate
action is taken I can only see it becoming worse. I should have made
the decision last year when it was obvious that the numbers of
anglers moving around meant fishing against the fish was almost
impossible so apart from one more FAS barbel teach-in and the odd day
guiding through the stretches I know like the back of my hand its
without doubt time to move to pastures new.
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