Friday, 15th July 2016, I head again to the Warks Avon in the hope of a new PB bream again arriving in my swim at around 0650 and making my first cast at 0720.
Tackle was my usual 12′ feeder rod tackled up with 8lb main line straight through to a size 10 Kamasan Animal barbless hook and with a 15g open end cage feeder loaded with the usual feed mix of crumb, pellet, dead maggot, rice, maize, hemp, etc with a splashing of hemp oil added too.
For most of the day, the bait in use was worm tipped with side hooked maggot although I did try a bunch of 7-8 maggots and breadflake at times, but soon reverted back to worm.
As usual bites came quite quickly but first capture of the day was a nice 4lb 14oz bream at 0900 on worm, followed by a small (2oz?) chub at 0930 on maggot and a 1lb 10oz chub on worm at 1115.
And after this things went quite quiet with just a few tugs every now and again and, as I wanted to collect Liz from work, I packed in at 1400 … on the road at 1430 … and arrived in Wolverhampton (30 miles with 50%+ on the motorway) … 2 HOURS LATER! A journey made in hell … backed up on the motorway due to roadworks (OK, so its a 50mph limit and that would actually be maintained if EVERYONE actually stayed in their lane and didn’t lane dodge causing the folks behind to have to brake and so slow down the procession to something more like an average 25mph!) – and then, when eventually off the motorway, every learner on their first ever lesson in the UK was in front, every traffic light turned red as I approached, everybody seemed to regard 30mph limits as 20mph ones even with an open road ahead…everyone slowed for speed cameras (which have been turned off for 5 years or more in the West Midlands area anyway except on M’ways) from their 20mph to 15mph…. ARGGGGHHHHH! Just glad Liz was late getting out of work anyway for her 1600 finish and so appeared within 5 minutes of my arrival…
Anyway, not too much caught – but it does raise a job to be done before the next river trip … if using a feeder …. and that is to ensure I fit baitrunner/freespool type reels, didn’t have one on this session and that accounted for at least half a dozen missed bites. Why? Well, I’ve only just got into using feeders – stillwater and river – and so the problem has not raised its head before. Basically, baiting the hook is no problem as having retrieved the line from the water the hook falls naturally to hand BUT to fill the feeder requires more line to be released from the reel in order for it to reach the groundbait bowl … and to do that with a non-baitrunner reel requires the anti-reverse to to be turned off in order to be able to pull line off. However, after filling the feeder and casting out, the problem was that I’d often forget to turn the anti-reverse back on again … so that, when I had a bite and struck, the reel just backwound against the pull of the current and the weight of the feeder and thus no force was applied at the hook… and no fish hooked :( So, I need to get baitrunners put on my river rods for feeder use….
stevetheangler 
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