Top Five On The Thames

Just had a mega three days on the Thames Festival, superbly ran by Darren Rogers and very generously sponsored by Daiwa!

Three 23-angler zones with the fishing spread across Abingdon, Culham, Upper Moors and Appleford. Talk before the festival was whether or not last year’s bream bonanza would be repeated. Well I don’t think a single bream was caught all three days! It was an out-an-out silverfish on the pole match and that suited me down to the ground.

Day One I was at Culham on a very rainy day. Bank erosion meant this peg is set back from the adjacent ones and it took me ages to get a platform erected in the reeds. I was sweating, coughing and spluttering (still), but nice and comfy once I was finally sorted.

It was surprisingly deep, a good 10ft, and I’ve fished two swims at 9m and 13m, plus a choppy swim 11m down the peg, once I’d lopped the reeds to see down there. I don’t always fish a worm swim on this river as it tends to just draw in crayfish, but I remembered John Weedon caught some big ones from this area last year. It was a good decision as I managed an early 1lb perch before the inevitable Ronnie and Reggies homed in!

The rest of the match I’ve swapped between my two groundbait lines, maggots early and then casters. Bleak were a pain, but a 2g rig bombed down could get through to the dace and roach. Mid-match a couple of grebes totally wrecked my long pole swim and all I could catch was dace on my shorter line for 45 minutes.

I have used the same mix every day, which was Sonubaits Deep Water, Black Roach with a dash of Sweet Skimmer and River, bulked out with Terre d’Arthur. The fish have sat hard over that mix all three days, so I have bags of confidence in it.

When the roach finally returned, the bleak had thankfully gone and the last 90 minutes was beautiful. Proper Thames roach fishing! My 14lb 13oz was comfortably enough to win the zone and the second highest weight on the day behind Steve Harwood’s 15lb 2oz of roach from Abingdon. A great start!

Day Two and I decided to not pack my five extra keepnets in the morning! Not very often you get that crazy dilemma on a river, but it’s a 50lb limit on this festival and you ‘might’ catch 200lb+ of bream. Well I only went and drew peg 1 on Upper Moors, which is THE Thames record peg, set last year by Tom Hobbs with an unbelievable 297lb! Just 2oz came off the peg the previous day, though, and I honestly never thought I’d see a bream, so just two keepnets came to my peg and I only popped one in.

I’ve naturally fed a bream swim 3/4 across with plenty of grub, but felt my priority was a safe weight of roach on the pole. It plumbed up really nice with around 8ft at 13 metres. A few perch, dace and roach short and then I’ve just swapped between a couple of groundbait swims. Not frantic, but chunky roach nice and steady most of the match. Pinkies were definitely best for me on the day and 6-8 Slik in a XTR Finesse Kit was ideal.

My 18lb 3oz earned me another zone win and was the third best weight on the day, with Steve Townsend top this time with 18lb 14oz from Abingdon.

Highlight was watching two rowers speedily crashing into the large ‘unmissable’ mid-river danger sign. I think they damaged their boat. Certainly their egos. Just wish there were a few more of those danger signs the next day…

So onto the third and final day and I was tying at the top with Steve Harwood and Tom Hobbs. I drew peg 10 at Abingdon and was a bit disappointed to be perfectly honest. Just 6lb had come off it the previous two days and there had been no big weights anywhere near it to suggest the bigger Abingdon redfins were in residence. I just prayed the rowers would be in a considerate mood. Erm, no chance of that…

There was a big weed bed right out to 10m, so no short line today. I spent a good 20 minutes with a weed cutter on an extra-long handle trying to clear a hole, but had to give up with that idea. At least I’d made it a bit easier to ship a rig out and hopefully less pike would be hiding in front of me. I thankfully only had one pike leap out at a roach all day. Dave to my left had great big ones leaping out and taking his fish multiple times! My pike curse seems to have gone… for now!

The rowers and their speedboat instructors were already bombing up and down all over the river as I set up, right over what would be my pole line. I took great pleasure in telling one of the ignorant ##### to get off his ####-ing mobile phone and carry on rowing out of my peg! When the army rowing club finally stopped the ‘pink plonkers’ boys club descended en masse onto the river. Scant regard for any other river user and sometimes even three abreast. Lovely! Then I had a nice big barge leave its mooring and turn around in front of me, turning my 13m swim into a washing machine as he opened up his engine. Great!

All of this was compounded by the relentless wind. It was shocking. Most people said they couldn’t hold 13 metres, but it was the only place I could get a bite, so I just had to hang on to my XTR 700, which has been a proper workhorse this week. To give you some idea of the wind, a 2g rig was sometimes going upstream! The tiny bleak were a nightmare too, so even though my roach were not really ‘caster stamp’ I had to fish that on a heavy rig just to keep catching. A maggot or pinkie just produced tiny eyeballs that weren’t worth catching.

With the relentless wind, boaters, weed and countless times shipping back to check my hook bait, it was possibly the least enjoyable match I’ve ever had on the Thames. Even my cameras were off after two hours as Tourettes were in full force, plus it was too windy to change my batteries!

After five frazzled hours I don’t think I could have done much more, but felt I’d got just 6lb to 7lb in my net. On the scales, however, they’ve actually gone a surprising 9lb (even after stupidly leaving a chunky roach in my net). That was much more than I thought, enough to win the 6-peg sub-section and beat four anglers both ways. Unfortunately the early pegs produced again and I was just 1lb 8oz adrift of the section win, though, leaving me with a 4th in section. That was about what I thought I’d get, but a lot tighter than I expected.

So, back at the excellent HQ for the results, with food and drink laid on afterwards. Tom Hobbs was crowned a very deserving winner. After smashing the river record out of sight last year, he won the final day with 20lb of roach; the top weight of the week. He was the only angler on a perfect three-point score and a 49lb total. A faultless performance!

They paid the top 15 and I managed to hang on to the fifth prize, a nice £600 cheque and a £150 Daiwa tackle voucher. Along with two vouchers for winning Day 1 and Day 2 zones it was a really great pickup. I just wish the last day’s fishing was a bit more bearable. I can put up with wind OR boats, but both together was a nightmare on the day and pretty sure everyone else in my 12 pegs felt the same!

Those external factors aside, the festival was absolutely brilliant. So well run by Darren Rogers with help from Jen and Jay and all the stewards and helpers. Not to mention several days of very hard graft from a hard-working team clearing and raking swims for us all to fish. Well done all!