#4. Go with the flow...

It's no word of a lie that my favourite form of fishing is trotting the stick float. In my opinion you just can't beat it. The moment the float dips and u strike into a fish is just pure magic. The last few months the opportunities to do this have been limited due to the heavy weed in the river. But after the recent wash through of rain water and the cooler weather the weed has started to clear. So this past weekend I thought I would get out and do some trotting 🎣🌧

I decided to have an early start on Sunday so I could cover a few places. On arrival the river was looking pukka. Some extra flow and a really nice tinge of colour. This filled me with some definite confidence as the rivers down here have been gin clear for weeks. 🏞

River looking spot on

As always tactics were simple, a light well balanced rod with light line. For this trip I would be trying out some Drennan dibber floats. There really light and would be great when targeting roach that are often quite easily spooked. There designed for pole fishing but a friend recently explained there benefit when targeting silver fish in tough/summer conditions. For bait I would be using caster and maggots with bread for back up if required.

Drennan Dibber's are perfect for clear rivers

Well, I got off to a good start with a nice roach pretty much first trot, which was soon followed by several more over the next hour. When bites dried up I moved to other swims with gaps in the weed picking up the odd roach and perch. I also managed a few clonking gudgeon which were great to see. Always wished they could grow to a few pounds as they would look epic. After a few hours bites started to dry up and it was at this point I noticed the river changing. The level was dropping and the colour was beginning to clear out 😦😔

The Roach were on it

It was at this point I decided to make hay and call it a day on this part of river and move over to another section where I fancied a go for some dace. It's a little early yet for dace fishing for my liking but having picked up a dace of 12oz a few weeks back I thought it worth ago. I used the same tactics as I had for the roach earlier in the day. Well, it was clear the dace were in the swim as I had a fish a cast. Sadly, not the big dace, though there were some big dace in the swim, the small ones were on it in a flash. This is normally the case this time of year and I say small ones, they were all around 6/7oz 🐟

An average Dace for this venue

All in all it was a good day roving about on the stick float. Conditions still aren't quite right for this form of fishing and as the temperatures continue to drop it will only get better. I can't wait for autumn and winter when I can really get some serious trotting done. Then I can really get amongst some of the special silver fish I'm lucky enough to have on my patch using the best form of fishing I know 😃👍🏻🎣