How High's the Water Mama

When I got up I checked the river levels. The Ouse was still falling, but way upstream the tributaries were slowly rising. At 3m up I knew i was still within it's banks and that it would be fishable provided it didn't rise too fast. By the time I'd picked my mate up and was heading towards the river it was starting to rise again. The rain that had swung across during the night was coming out of the dales already. When we got to river things didn't look too bad. We'd already discussed tactics in the car. My mate had decided to wander along dropping a bait in any slacks. Whereas I'd decided to head to where I knew there'd b a couple of large slack areas near the confluence of the two rivers that generally produced a pike or two, and on occasion considerably more. I left him at the first inviting slack and headed upstream.

Plumbing up showed the upstream rod would be fishing at around four fathoms and the downstream rod nearer five. A sardine was flung into the upstream slack. While attaching a lamprey to the other rod the float boobed about before disappearing. I wound down to nothing but a missing sardine. Quickly replaced it was dropped back in the same slack. The lamprey down stream of it in another slack. A phone call from my mate to tell me he'd already had seventeen million branches and a swimfeeder, but no pike. It seems a lot of the slacks were full of debris from the previous flood(s). The lamprey float then bobbed about before sliding under. A strike hit something solid, very solid,. A bit of pressure and up came a length of branch. Out went the lamprey again. The river was now rising at about two inches an hour and the slack appeared to be getting smaller, but all that had happened was it had moved as increasing amounts of water came down the Nidd. Around eleven thirty the sardine float bobbed and disappeared. I contacted with with a feisty little jack that temporally snagged it's self. At the net one of the hooks snagged at the front, but a bit of wiggling the net got the little beast in before it spat the other hook out. A nice little fish of 70cm with quite a few leeches on it. The river was now rising a bit quicker and required a bit of adjustment of the depth the floats were set at.

By lunch my mate had arrived having taken a few more branches and a foul hooked chublet. He reckoned the bait must have landed on it as it was hooked in the back just ahead of the dorsal fin. The wind was now rather gusty and every now and then showers of catkins would fall from the trees making quite a splash as they hit the water. While boiling water for tea I managed to set fire to the handle of my cool bag which I was using as a wind-brake. After lunch we tried a few swims upstream, but they too seemed to be full of rubbish. so we returned back to the big slacks. My mate fishing one downstream of me where he lost a little jack at the net. By mid afternoon the river had risen a couple of feet and was rising quicker. The slacks we were fishing were now disappearing and we were now struggling to hold bottom, even with 4oz leads. We decided to call it a day. Just after we got packed up a large limb broke from a tree and landed in the river in front of where I'd been fishing.

Looks like the end of the river season is going to be another damp squib with the rivers virtually unfishable. On the way home we discussed the idea of heading south into Lincolnshire or somewhere, but it would have been rather a short session as he had an appointment first thing in the morning. We decided to to see what was happening with the levels in the morning.

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