River Nene at Stibbington - Sunday 6th March

I was really quite excited to be going to the river after having spent the last few weekends fishing the canal, I had chosen to fish near the boat yard at Stibbington on the river Nene.
We arrived at Sutton village at 08.30 and after lifting the tackle over a fence started the walk to the river which is about 5 minutes across a couple of meadows, the weather was cool but it was quite a nice day. The section opposite the boat yard was well sheltered from the light easterly wind and what wind there was came from behind us so would no hamper our presentation. I decided to sit adjacent to the downstream end of the boatyard as the peg was a little flatter and more comfortable because I had left the footplate off of my box to save weight and didn't fancy holding a pole with my feet all to cock as it would end in back ache.


A great peg with a number of options

Although I was just dying to flick a float across the far side and loose feed maggot to see if I could draw some of the resident Chub out from under the boats I wanted to catch some Roach.
I decided to fish at about 10m and planned to use a 3gr float so that I could run through or slow it down if needed and as the flow was still reasonable and holding some colour I would set up a pole feeder rig and nail the bait to the bottom if the fish didn't want to chase a bait.



One of my favourite river patterns for when its moving

I cupped in 2 balls of Dynamite Baits groundbait made up of 60% Roach and 40% River and to this I added a few Pinkies and some Hemp and casters. I started off by running the rig through  the 7ft deep swim at full speed with a maggot on the hook and on 3rd run through the float went under and I struck into a tiny fish. OMG this roach was smaller than the canal fish I had been catching recently and really not what I wanted or expected.

Believe it or not this small Dace is bigger than most of the Roach I caught today

The next few runs through produced similar results so I slipped 2 Red maggots on the pole feeder rig and dropped the feeder over my initial 2 ball of groundbait. After a couple of minutes I got a positive indication but missed the bite and I managed to miss the next 5 bites in the same manner but on the 7th put in  just as I put the pole into the rest the float bristle I was using as an indicator buried and on the strike about 3ft of No 10 elastic came out of the pole as I lifted into a Chub of about 1lb 4oz. This was more like it so in I went again and yes you guessed it not a sniff so I cupped in another ball of groundbait and went in on the float again. Although this wasn't producing too many fish I was able to pick off odd fish up to a couple of ounces buy altering the speed that I was presenting the bait at to about half the speed of the flow.
My friend was 2 pegs below me and was fishing a stick float and although not catching many fish he had managed 4 Chub between 12oz and 1lb.
I stopped for a few minutes to have a bite to eat and set up a stick float as that is what I had planned to do all along even though I had elected to start on the pole to see if I could get a bite. I finished the day with a couple of hours on the stick float and centre pin and even though no better fish came my way I really enjoyed running the float through the swim with all of the control the pin gives you. This really is one of my favourite methods of fishing the river and has produced some really good weights for me over the last couple of years although today is not one of those days. I ended the session with 48 fish for about 3lb with my friend only adding about 10 small fish to his earlier Chub.



I worked hard for this catch but as ever really enjoyed the challenge

 On packing up we noticed another angler who looked familiar just around the bend and a couple of hundred yards upstream of us so we popped over to see how he had done.
As we suspected it turned out to be former Oundle AS Team member and friend of ours Dave Lutkin who is a very good angler on running water. On enquiring how he had done it became apparent that things had not really panned out as they should have as Dave had only had 1 Chub of about 12oz and 6 small Dace. Although the river looked perfect on the day it was probably never going to be great with an east wind and such a high pressure reading conspiring against our best laid plans.
Never mind we still have the final week of the season and I am planning another 3 trips out before the end of the river season is upon us.