Ivan's Angle: Tuesday 21st February - Pleasure Session River Tone, Taunton

Friday, 24 February 2017

Tuesday 21st February - Pleasure Session River Tone, Taunton

Fellow Clevedon Freshwater Angling Club mate Scott Smallwood has a month off so contacted me about wanting to fish the River Tone down in Taunton as he had only ever fished it once before many years ago and he had seen the catches I had from the free stretch near B & Q. The weather forecast and conditions looked good for Tuesday 21st so I arranged to meet up with Scott in Clevedon at 07:30. As we drove down the M5 it was raining quite hard but the nearer we got to Taunton it began to clear up. It only took us about 30 minutes to get to junction 25 and then a 5 minute drive to the back of B & Q where there was access to the river.
We parked up and had a walkabout first and the river looked in mint condition, a little clear but plenty of pace. I pointed out a few swims to Scott and he choose one upstream of the picnic bench, I went down to my favourite swim in the Copse.

Importantly we both had nice long trot. The stick float was going to be the set up today and I also set up a tip rod for the bread as there are some good chub in the stretch. I advised Scott to continually loose feed as there is a good head of small fish around.
We both got going and I was into fish straight away. A mix of roach, dace, chublets and bleak. A good pouch full of caster and hemp was fired in every trot and after 30 minutes I had my first chub, a nice fish of around 3lbs and a lovely fight on the slim rod. It literally was a bite every run through and another chub soon graced the net,
I started to get pike trouble with one sizeable fish attacking the fish in the keep net. It was biting the metal rings and twisting and turning like a great white shark in a frenzy. Even knocking it on the body with the landing net handle did not deter it, I almost netted it at one point before it disappeared.
Scott came down to see how I was getting on and said he had 2 big chub and lots of small fish which he found hard getting through. He too was having pike problems. Seeing me swing a chublet of around 8 ozs he asked how many of them I had as it appeared my fish were of better quality.
Scott went back to have another crack and I continued to catch although the pike were really starting to be a nuisance and I did manage to land one after the hook some how got caught in one of its fins preventing it from biting the line.
Towards the end of the session I gave the tip a try with bread flake and liquidised in a small feeder.
This made a good difference and I had some good roach and 3 more decent chub.
It truly was a great session. I ended up with around 15 lbs of chub, 10 labs of mixed silvers and a pike of around 5 lbs. Scott had 2 nice chub and about 8 lbs of silvers.