Defeated By The Derwent

Friday saw me back at the Derwent. Quite why I don't know, as the reports hadn't been good. The river was the colour of stewed tea, about a foot up and not rushing through too quickly.  As I set off along the bank it started to rain, which solved the problem of where to fish. The long walk was out, so I settled for one of the less inconsistent swims. In any conditions the barbel normally come from the middle of the river and upstream is a nice slack that once produce two five pound chub, but normally produces nothing. The pellet rod went in downstream and the double lob worm set up went in the slack. I recast at regular intervals to get a few pellets in to the swim and chopped worm and ground bait into the slack.

The first bite came to the pellet rod. Whatever was on the end felt a bit odd as it swung into the nearside weeds. Rather than just heave I could wander downstream and pull form the opposite angle. Out popped a stick from the weeds. Whether there'd been a fish on initially I don't know. It did feel a bit like a fish. I then had three real rattling bites on the worm rod that resulted in nothing more than a chewed worm. Following one of the afternoon's short sharp showers I was lucky enough to see a double rainbow.

As afternoon moved into evening the amount of debris the downstream feeder picked up started to become a nuisance. While there was nothing much on the surface there seemed to be a lot of sunken leaves drifting down in the current. Another angler walk past with nothing to report in the way of fish, but had given up because of the debris. I was going to fish on in to dark, but the debris problem just got worse dragging the feeder into the nearside weeds. I tried the pellet rod in the upstream slack for half an hour before giving up.

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