No fish, but I got my spanner back!

The trees have been trimmed - time (and room) to fish

Yesterday, I got back down to Kent to fish with Tim. Having been stuck indoors for the past few weeks, I was really looking forward to a day fishing with the other bloke on The Medway, upstream of Maidstone town centre, attempting to catch a fish! Neither of us did. Since we first fished here, the trees have been trimmed, and the place looks completely different. At last, we will be able to cast with ease. We started off having a go at dead-baiting for pike, as Tim had bought a few frozen roach and skimmers. This was a big learning curve as neither of us had tried this before. Just trying to get the single circle hook through the body of the fish (now unfrozen!) was a bit of a palaver - it would have made a poor comedy sketch. None of what you see on YouTube is as easy as it looks, and this is no different.

Armed with a good few hours of experience, we need to go back to the virtual classroom and see if we can move on a stage. The bait was getting attacked, we were just not feeling a bite, or when we did, we were not connecting with the fish. Hey Ho. After a few hours of 'feeding' the fish we decided to pack it in and go back to float fishing and chatting - sort of what we do best, the chatting that is!

We still blanked, not even a twitch. I guess Saturday's heavy rain had changed the river, that was the clearest I have seen it since we first fished here, back at the beginning of the summer. This part of the river is above the first lock, so the flow is governed by when the lock is opened or the rate water that is allowed to pass. Now, call me thick, but I have just realised that maybe we should be fishing this stretch of the river more like a canal than a river...

Although the fishing was not great, I did come home with a catch, not mine but one of Tim's. When the guys were trimming the trees, he borrowed their magnet-on-a-string and managed to recover the spanner I dropped into the river when we were removing the ladders. That was back on the 4th of August. The spanner had been in the river for a good couple of months. When Tim got it out, it looked in excellent condition apart from what looked like some light surface rust. When I got it home, I gave it a quick wash in warm soapy water and the 'rust' dissipated. It was just a build up of reddy-orange sediment that had deposited itself in the lettering and the jaws of the ring-end. If this is not a good endorsement of quality, I don't know what is. The picture below shows a brand new spanner that I bought to replace the lost item and the recovered spanner. Can you tell which is which?

The lower one has spent the past couple of months at the bottom of the river!

Next time we fish from here, I will be using a slider float and having a go with a long pole. As far as the pike fishing is concerned, I have discovered what we were doing wrong with the rig, I just need to go and find out how to use it! I will let you know how that goes in due course. All in all, it was a great day, with good company and fun fishing, even if we did not land a single fish.

Ralph.