Fishing the Salisbury Rivers

 River Nadder

Fishing the Salisbury Rivers

Both the two main rivers that flow through Salisbury, the River Avon and the River Nadder were less than a mile from my home, so I used to fish them often. Over the years I and my fishing friends got to know them like the back of our hands. We knew just about every swim and what each one was likely to produce in pleasure and match fishing conditions.

Because of this we were fairly confident that we could produce the goods given a reasonable swim. Each swim could be different according to the weather and state of the river. Both the rivers tended to fish the best after fining down. When they had a greenish blue tinge to them with a little tinge of colour to them they would be really good and a real pleasure to fish.

The Nadder could come up fairly quick and colour up after a little rain.

It would fine down within a couple of days and that would be the right time to fish it. 

The Avon was much slower to rise and colour up but could take up to a week to fine down and drop in depth. Both rivers tended to fish their best in the winter months after the first few frosts had killed off some of the weed and the high flood type rains had flushed away this weed and all the dead leaves that had fallen from the bank side trees.

The depths could be up to around six feet in some swims and opposite the Fire Station there was plenty of depth for the local kids to swim in the river. These depths were to change over the next ten years and not for the better I am afraid. Both rivers were capable of yielding match weights close to the 20lb mark.

The Avon tended to produce some big grayling 

up to about 2lb and also some good dace around the pound mark. As the Avon was primarily a mixed fishery you would often catch some big native brown trout but they did not count in matches and had to be returned immediately after capture. There were, however, some specimen roach to be had and they would weigh around the 2lb plus mark. A few of these turned up every now and again.

The Nadder tended to yield plenty of good dace, a lot of good grayling and some nice chub up to the 4lb mark. Again, you could also pick up the odd 2lb plus roach, but they mainly fell to specimen hunters fishing the deeper water down towards the Old Mill. There were some huge shoals of specimen dace below the Mill Pools alongside the West Harnham Cricket Pitch. See below. Yours truly bagging the Dace

Both the rivers could be hard to fish when the water was low and gin clear, but good anglers could still get reasonable bags of fish by long trotting providing there were not too many anglers fishing there at the time. In those types of conditions we always tried to give each match angler about 30 yards of trotting distance and this improved the overall match weights.

On these occasions, if you wanted to win money on the Match Pools you had to be capable of producing the odd couple of bonus fish when swims were dying. What normally happened was the clear water conditions made catching, playing and landing fish without putting the shoal down and seeing them disappear out of your swim a bit of a nightmare.

Once hooked, you had to play the fish slowly upstream to get it away from the shoal without spooking them. Any crashing on the surface would be a bit of a disaster so you had to keep the rod down close to the surface to keep the fish hugging the bottom until you were ready for landing it.

 Small, size 20 hooks were the order of the day and it was easy for the fish, especially grayling, to wriggle or spin off. As you can imagine it was no easy task to keep the fish in your swim.  Continuous loose feeding, even when playing a fish was crucial to keeping the shoal calm as they were easily spooked.

To get the odd bonus fish which made the difference between winning and being an also ran, my two friends John Stephonson, Brian Duckett and I had to come up with new methods and baits which would give us the edge on the other match anglers. We pooled our knowledge and experiences to help each other and agreed to share any winnings between the 3 of us. I would like to think that my input lead us to do quite well and we managed to frame on most river matches.

We had our first breakthrough by changing the type of float that we used for trotting. Most of the other anglers used stick floats which were solid balsa types.  You needed a float that would allow you to hold it back in the flow and let the bait travel in front of it. Normally the stick float did the job well. We found that a new type of stick float which had come on the market worked better. These new stick floats had a wire stem and a slightly, more dumpy, top to them. 

We found that they could be held back more easily where the flow was a bit swifter and they did not get pulled under so easily by the faster current.   Also because they had very thin wire stems they did not spook the fish so much in clear water. This improved our catches greatly and the floats were obviously less intrusive to the shoals of fish.

The floats were much easier to control, especially in more boiling type currents allowing you to present your bait better. If the fish could see the denser type of stick floats they would ignore the bait.  The river matches tended to follow a pattern of a fish a chuck for the first couple of hours of a five hour match. Over the next couple of hours the catch rates would get lower and lower. The last hour of the match usually provided the winner due to the angler managing his swim better.

Also the odd bonus fish would be caught by anglers who tried different methods or baits and really searched their swims. These bonus fish tended to be bigger than the normal shoal fish. They would not have to compete with the shoals for your bait and the bites were usually very positive. Using the small size 20 hooks made landing the bonus fish very difficult and usually the more skilful angler would land those fish while others inevitably lost them, cursing their luck.

The bonus fish would inevitably be the difference in your final placing in the match. Flogging the swims with loads of maggots all through the match usually resulted in catching trout which were voracious in mopping them up.

Once hooked, they would go crashing through the swim and often go through the swims of anglers above or below you. This would obviously ruin your swim for quite a long time on each occasion and slow down your catch rate. When using maggots or casters you needed to throw only half a dozen at a time to keep the shoal wanting more and not to entice the native brown trout onto your hook.

One day when I / we were pleasure fishing prior to a weekend match, one of us caught a trout 

and as the fish was netted it ejected a few eggs into the net. The eggs were a vivid orange in colour. This got us thinking about whether the other coarse fish might feed on them at this time in the life of the trout as they were spawning. We could not think how we might use them or come up with a substitute which looked anything like the fish eggs at that time. We desperately wanted to try and see if the eggs would work and perhaps give us the edge we were searching for.

The only thing we could think of might be a maggot which we could dye orange. There were no coloured maggots to be had on the angling market at that time, but as we always read the angling press of the day to keep up with new ideas and tackle tips we kept checking the Angling Times and the Anglers Mail for information.

Shortly after we had a breakthrough when we read that some bright sparks had found a way of dying maggots by introducing various dyes to the maggot feed. Quite few vegetable dyed maggots became available to tackle dealers in yellow and red. We tried the yellow maggots but they made only a limited difference to our catches.

We needed orange and eventually some did appear on the market but we were warned off using them by the angling press as the chrisodyne dye was a carcinogenic and could cause cancer if ingested by the angler. We did go through a period when some anglers would use them but wearing gloves and making sure they did not eat their sandwiches while the dye was around them.

A safe orange dye was soon found and we managed to get a good supply from our local tackle shop (Reids Tackle) in Wilton. We decided to give the orange and the red dyed maggots a go to see if they made a difference or not. 

The red ones proved to be quite good as a change of bait after using worm on the hook and helped us get the odd bonus fish towards the end of match.

When we started using the orange maggots we knew we had hit the jackpot. The fish loved them and went crazy for them. They looked just like trout eggs as they drifted by, especially in the shallower swims which tended to flow a bit faster than the deeper ones. It was quite a long time before anyone cottoned on to what we were doing.

We also discovered that the odd bonus grayling would lie really close to the bank, sometimes within inches. These fish were suckers for a worm presented on their nose and sometimes a double red maggot would do the trick. With these new innovations we had discovered I felt a sense of confidence I had never had before. I knew that given a reasonable swim all the three of us had a great chance of winning any of the Salisbury River matches we entered.

At this time there was quite a revolution in quality fishing tackle. The trade came up with stronger, thinner lines which made presentation and float control a lot easier as they were less affected by the wind. New thinner stronger rods with really thin soft tips came on the market and made it much easier to control and land the grayling which were apt to lunge, wriggle and spin off, especially with small hooks.

Once the hook lengths were thinner and stronger we were able to produce more bites and increase our catch rates. Keeping up with the new tackle scene and new methods was crucial to keep ahead of other anglers and this is what we did. At that time, if I drew a decent swim on either the River Avon or the River Nadder I expected to win and had great confidence in my ability. It was a magic period in my match fishing and one I really enjoyed.

After a couple of years of really good results I was persuaded to take up Winter League and Open Matches away from club fishing. I accepted the challenge and it was probably the worse decision I have ever made in my angling history, but that is  another story.