Fished the Kennett with Marco (Pike71). A lovely sunny, warm autumn day but the river was very low and the fish very spooky. I ended with 15 of which 4 were suicidal baby brownies (I know.....I tried to avoid them) with 5 taken on nymphs, a couple on spiders and 7 on dries so a rewarding day with plenty of variety. The disappointment was the very small size of the fish, I only need the net once. Marco did better, with more fish (he has a deadly little unweighted pink shrimp) and a couple of sizeable stocked rainbows.

A nice day but we need about a week of solid rain!!

Some pictures

My best grayling (less than 1lb though)



Marco into a fish



The river

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im fishing the kennet on sunday with ACW at lower denford, hope i have as much luck as yourself. after the lumps i encountered from the irfon this year i can't wait to get amongst them.(no matter how small) jon mcmillan.

Good luck! I must get myself over to the Irfon, I haven't fished it this season

Peter

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A lovely day indeed! although when I got home I had to take some paracetamol due to backache from being on my knees most of the time, trying to hide myself (which was the key). Water levels very low and fishes very very spooky. The water is full of decent size fishes and I managed some really good ones. As peter said the winning bug was a pink shrimp on the point which attracted all the graylings and few trouts. In a calm deep pool I also hooked a U-boat rainbow which took me 15 meters of line in 3" before jumping out of the water and un-hook itself. it was really huge, I'd not be surprise if was hitting the 5 pounds mark.

Peter: in the last spot you pointed me to, I managed to land 3 very nice graylings, among these a magnicifent cock fish with a very colorful dorsal fin. I had to hide and stay very low behind the weed and cast very delicately 1mt ahead of them.

Overall a really nice day but I think next time I will go there after some heavy rains. Can't wait to see how this place would be with higher water leve


Marco

Well done Marco, we'll do it again after some rain....where do you get those pink shrimps from?

Regards

Peter

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Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans
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Couple more pictures courtesy of Marco

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Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans
John Lennon

http://walksandfishes.blogspot.com/

Fished the Kennett a coiuple of times this week, Friday when it was wet and windy and I had 10, and today with 3 others (including Grayson from this forum). Today was hard work, very bright sun and worryingly low river, probably 3" down on Friday even after some very heavy rain. The EA are doing some work on the main river at the bottom of the beat so presumably this is to blame. Anyway, we ended with about 20 between us on nymphs and dries.

Regards

Peter

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Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans
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"a couple of times?" ..Jes...Peter you ***** all those graylings,no wonder it's hard work for me to fool one then ... did you manage to get any decent size one?

As last minute decision,with an Italian fellow we did a last minute booking for BArton Court on Saturday, it was the worst fishing day of the last years I think,there were winds at 70mph with torrential showers that make the fishing a real challenge. (we were the only ones on the stretch!) we managed to get to the river banks at 1pm only and fished 3 hours scarse. Incredibily, we spotted few big fishes raising but they were disturbed by lots of weeds, leaves and others stuff carried by the current.....my biggest catch? a 15cm grayling ...

Do you think Denford waters are still low after all this rain?

Tight lines!

Marco

Marco, my guess is the river wil come up a bit and sink back to its present low levels,she is probably running a bit murky for the next few days.
With the chalk this rain will not come through the aquifers for some months ,
we hopefully will have a wet winter to rechacrge the chalk streams ,ideally little ans often ,rather than the dry weeks and than torrential down pours similar to friday and saturdays events,these just run off the hard baked land and flash down the chalk streams with little being stored down below the Chalk downs.
Glad you have found the wee pink bug ,killer is'nt it !

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Andy Wren
Winter grayling taking a year off !
Claret not just a great dubbing colour!

Give the Lower Itchin a try Marco

Regards

Peter

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