Swale Meet Again

With recent heavy rains here and there I hoped that the Swale had coloured up a bit. As it happens it hadn't, it was still clear and low. The water had cooled though. It has to be said this section is not the best for float fishing. Most of the swims are bordered by trees pushing out over the water. Being quite shallow though wading could overcome this, if only I'd put them in the car.  Still trotting for barbel with maggots was what I was going to do, so that's what I did. I suppose I could have tried wet wading, but  with the temp of the water and the fact it was a cool breezy evening I didn't think I'd last long at it.

The first trotable (is that a word?) swim I found was a nice fast section after a shallow section. Rigged up with a 4.5g loafer and size 14 hook I was quickly into little chublets and even smaller dace. After an hour or so a couple of hungry pike showed up. A little jack that popped out of a slack chasing the double red maggots, but the fish. Just after it seemed to give up a larger pike appeared and had several goes at fish I was bringing in. After a while it too gave up, but the swim was now dead. I gave it another half hour but didn't even get so much as a chewed maggot.

I moved to the swim I fished last time I was here. There was no sign of any chub for me to frighten this time. The swim seemed to be full of gudgeon when I good get a good run down the swim. There seemed to be a lot of twigs and weed in it now. Shallowing up to avoid the debris resulted in chewed maggots and tiny dace/chublets occasionally.  After an hour I moved on.

The final swim was awash with minnows. I was about to give up when I bumped what felt like a decent fish off. I took to chucking maggots in by the handful to see if I could feed the minnows off. This seemed to work as I got less and less chewed maggots. By now it was starting to drizzle again. I'd been lucky with the rain or lack of it, just the occasional drizzle. By now it was getting dark, an hour early. Retiring seemed a good idea, especially as I thought I'd heard thunder in the distance. I got back to the car as the wind got up and the heavens opened.

The drive home was fun. The heavy rain and gusts of wind had brought a lot of debris down out of the trees, some of it quite big. I had to sop a couple of times to drag branches off the road. As the rain eased a new problem in the shape of a diversion appeared. Thankfully the signage was quite good but I got a bit disorientated as these were roads I'd hardly ever been down. Finally I arrived at the main road and the rest of the drive was uneventful. If we could just have a bit of heavy rain in the right place and raise the river levels a bit the barbel might come on the feed.