Thursday 4 April 2013

The River Wye 3


It was the summer holidays and my mate Steve and I were glued to the riverbank, the Roach-Bay on the Wye in fact. We'd had our fill of bleak, salmon par and gudgeon and now we had our sights set on chub (we'd both caught pike, but they were winter fish).

And it wasn't just any chub, inspired by the fact we had a set of scales, we were after a three pounder. We'd had quite a few fish, if memory serves I think we were averaging about two each per day - obsessed with stats even back then!

This day we'd had one each very early on, both over two pounds. Then we sat through the hot day. As evening started to approach I had the first bite in hours, a fight that between us became a thing of legend... And a 3¼lb chub!

I was the king of fishing... For about 5 minutes until after another fight that took far longer to talk about than experience, Steve had a 3½ pounder.

My Dad walked down to see us, and he'd brought a camera. They had been in and out of the keepnet a couple of times while we looked at them, but now they were immortalized on film and released.

The next day we went back to the Roach-Bay and tried to catch another...

Previously

3 comments:

  1. Great story Brian and a lovely photo. I remember my first three pound chub like it was yesterday. Stalked on floating chum mixers on June 16th from the Suffolk Stour, it was a battle scarred old thing and weighed 3lbs 4ozs. I have a similarly amusing old snap of it somewhere.

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  2. Thanks, nice to remember there is a summer on the way... As I sit here and watch the April snow getting fatter and fluffier!

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  3. Thats why that area seemed to produce those big headed crocodile pike every now and again maybe?

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