A day without bream

The Glorious 16th dawned with still quite a  crocked back and a less than enthusiastic Commander in Chief so I didn't set off till after 8, any chance of any sense of normalcy about my gait firmly abandoned. After a coffee in my normal watching café I arrived by the river to see the whole world feeding the ducks and feral chickens. Good, the ducks wouldn't be in  the water. for  a while (couldn't be sure about the people, it being an urban spot, with roasting sun).

My go to first day spot was a bit tight but first trot and the world looked a little better, if not my back. And it being the upper Wensum a lovely little wild brownie was pulling the string. Trout are very pretty, and very easy to catch which is why I guess fly fishing was invented to inject some pretence of skill. (A bit like mullet) Even so, I do love catching them, they seem so exotic.

The roach were there too, and again a game little battler in the 15 footer and the pin on the second trot.

I was finding the tight spot a bit tricky with my back, and though the roach and trout were feeding well  I decided to look for a spot where I could sit for  a while, and as the near bank was quite over grown I couldn't easily sit to reach the shaded far bank pools so I crossed over the bridge into the park stretch to trot down to the pools. At which point half of Fakenham descended to spend a couple of hours paddling, chucking in sticks and generally fecking up my intended spots. Which was nice. Seems to be a furlough legacy from that first hot lockdown period when everyone discovered rivers. I did find  a spot I could sit in without too much mayhem and had a nice spell with roach and trout competing for the twin maggots (reds and whites on a #16 B560) and a single dace

I have written before about how different some of the roach look, especially on this stretch and some today caught the eye as looking dark and bronzy, almost like the colouration you get on small carplets in clear weedy waters.

The trout tailed off, and the roach became increasingly cagey as the sun got higher too and in the clear shallow water I could see that though they homed in on the splash of the little chubber float they were wary of it, and the bait dragging behind. The swims below are choked with weed until the winter but the roach potential is really good, and you can get some decent bags of dace in the faster water. And of course so many trout.

                                                

With a bit more depth and  some semblance of the bait traveling in front of the float they were easier to fool but in the end I resorted to laying on with a decent sized shot in that bit in front of me to act as a bolt with quite good effect and some better roach too. The stones have loads of life on them too.

This last fish  of the session was a real munter. A split dorsal, but  a clearly defined caudal fin anomaly, like  a fan tail goldfish and very strange scale pattern. A few decent sized mongrels were put in the adjacent lake that look similar, perhaps some got put in here too? I took pictures of 17 fish but caught many more. This part of the Wensum at least (only a handful of bendy miles from it's source in West Raynham) is far from dead as many would have you believe along its whole length.

Time for  a drink and a bite, and long enough a walk for my back to straighten from the car through the wild flower meadow of Fat Cow. Just burgers, loaded fries and ice cream but very boujie. Would be lovely on  a warm summers evening with the lights twinkling and swifts swooping low over the meadow.

  

And as we are  Norfolk perhaps less surprising as we do du different, not often you come across these by the side of the road. A Jaguar, once a common sight and sound in and out of RAF Coltishall. They used to turn over my house in Worsted in their speed reducing fly round into land if the wind was right. This one has it's airbrakes deployed.