Wednesday l had an angler booked in for a days guiding. After nearly forty years, Martin had realised just how things had changed and how fish had got bigger so needed an introduction into the tackle needed, bait to use and to be shown a stretch of river he had recently joined.

Arriving at dawn and after days of heavy rain l had given Martin the opportunity to fish for a couple of hours and then reschedule if conditions proved difficult and looking at the river rushing across the weir, coloured and up, it was going to be tough. The bread tactics went out of the window and the pellet rod came out as l thought chub wouldn’t be feeding but barbel might. Dropping in a productive summer swim we chatted, both feeling that a bite wasn’t going to happen, so when the rod wrapped round after just thirty minutes it took us both by surprise and unfortunately was missed. The importance of holding the rod, whatever the conditions, soon became apparent and after another twenty minutes a similar bite had Martin bent into what he thought wasn’t a big fish. By the way it was fighting it certainly wasn’t a barbel and after a couple of minutes a very short but deep chub surfaced. Not allowing it to surge off again l stretched the net out a scooped what was definitely a fish of a lifetime and at 6lb 9oz it smashed his previous best by over four-pounds! What a way to get back into angling!

Moving downstream l was amazed at the amount of knocks that were coming and began to think that a bite worth striking wasn’t going to come but in the boundary swim Martin once again found himself doing battle with another big chub, this time 5lb 9oz, what a brace.

Martin was using my tackle that consisted of a Korum Multi-feeder rod with the 1.5lb tip added, 10lb mainline down to a 1.5oz gripper lead, 10lb braided hooklink on which a size 8 Korum S3 was attached knotless knot style. Bait was the ever-reliable Sonubaits 13mm hard pellet, drilled and hair rigged and around the lead was a mix of scolded 4mm, 6mm and crushed pellets with a dose of CSL added.

Friday l made the near 200 mile round trip to Kent in search of a monster perch. The alarm awoke me at 4-30am and l arrived at the lake at opening time 7am. Being the first angler to arrive l made my way to an area that l knew had produced a perch of 5lb 8oz back in the summer but try as hard as l did all l had to show for my efforts were two small perch that fell to my prawn approach. The lake had loads of rain water in and was high covering most of the swims so l think that l had just arrived on a bad day and will try and time my next trip with more favourable conditions.