JULY

Hello and welcome to Angling Monthly with me Gary Markham.

By the time that you are reading this article the new 2010 River Season will be well underway and next month I will have some news on how they are fishing.

Anyway, I decided to have a walk along the Gipping a couple of days ago and I have to say that the river was looking in pretty good order. After the bad weather, the flood water moving through the Gipping Valley has appeared to have taken a lot of the old rubbish and debris down towards London Road and out into the Orwell.

There is weed starting to show as always along Elton Bank but it’s not bad. There were plenty of Roach topping as I walked the banks. As I got further along the river around the Chantry Cut area there were many Chub showing along this stretch.

Most of our lakes in the local area have all been fairly productive but the weather is still playing a part in how the fish are reacting. A couple of weeks ago we had really hot temperatures for three or four days which put the Roach and the Carp into spawning mode and then the weather cooled down and so did the fish as well, with a bit of luck the weather should settle down and so should the fishing.

Boat fishing has been very good with reasonable catches being made; there have been several Skate, Dogs, Bass and Smoothounds along with a few Cod. The Cod have now started to thin out now but the Cod season did finish up quite well with fish up to twenty pounds.

Beach fishing has also been reasonably good with a selection of summer specimens being caught like, Dogfish, Dabs, Bass, Sole and some Thornback Rays.

Everything seems to be a little bit late this year and we should start to see the first Garfish of the season, these can be caught on the float with small pieces of Herring or Mackerel for bait.

Trout fishing has been pretty good on most of our local fisheries. In particular Grafham and Hanningfield Reservoirs are well worth a try with some brilliant fishing at the moment. Look out for the Winalot Fly for the Trout and also Carp fishing.

We had a strange fish on my boat last week, on research it appears to be a Mediterranean Shad and weighed around two pounds.

Tight lines and good fishing for the next month