Short River Session

I had a lot of casters left over from the previous two matches and a few hours available Thursday morning, so I thought I would give Saltford straight (Mead Lane) a go. I have watched Charles Halliday videos on YouTube fishing here, and it seemed the fishing was good and the boats were no longer moored up.

I got out there about 9:30, and took a drive along the straight as I couldn’t see a parking spot (road is double yellow lines). Unfortunately the first two thirds of the straight were blocked by moored boats 🤬🤬🤬. The very end is private slipway, but there were a few spaces. I drove back up to where the parking is to see if any cars had moved, they hadn’t. But then I saw Charles who was going fishing upstream as he had also seen the boats. He told me I could park in the Jolly Sailor car park but would have to pay so I drove back down there. I paid a fiver for four hours parking which was the maximum, and pushed the gear up the road. I found a couple of platforms that had private mooring printed on them, no boats on them but I decided against fishing from them as didn’t want to get chucked off. Eventually I spied a small gap next to a post that said it was a deer crossing place. I didn’t think I would see any deer today in this heat.

Got my self in the peg, and quickly knocked up a bit of gbait and set up a 5g bolo float with 16 N10 to 0.11. 

With the hot sunny conditions I was a bit worried if the fish would feed, I wanted to fish as I did last Sunday at the Trees (which is upstream of here) so it was going to be regular small balls of gbait and caster. First run through nothing but second run down and a dace. In the first 30 minutes I had 6 dace and 1 roach all on single caster. I started to miss bites on the drop and had to shallow up, at one stage I was fishing a foot off bottom. As I fished on the roach moved in and the dace became few and far between. I had a couple of 10oz roach that were my biggest fish, but I did have 2 pike on which did slow things each time.

The wind got up a bit and made presentation awkward, the best bites came as the rig was settling and before the downstream wind caught the line. I fished for just 2 1/2 hours, but in that time I had 10lb of roach as most of the fish were 4oz to 6oz.

Awkward taking a photo on your own.

Nice to finally get a few fish on the river. This stretch had held roach here now for years, and as they are feeding well it makes me think are there not many roach at the moment up at Newbridge?  Back up there a week on Sunday and will find out I guess.  Until then that’s the fishing done for me.