Much Ado about Nothing Doing

When it's boring and you're waiting for a bite that looks like it'll never come, what do you do? I mess with the camera and take shots of nothing doing just in case something does. I even take them just in case nothing does, because what might be a really interesting blank where something 'important' occurs which might make 'nothing doing' well worth writing about, still requires pictures of something doing.


It's a blogging law that must be obeyed. No fish = write the backstory. No pictures = no story.

So I went down the cut, flicked out a disc of bread, fished it over a small bed of sloppy mash and waited for the first bite from a roach which should have come more or less at the hour mark because it usually does during winter fishing this way. Meanwhile I messed with the camera just in case nothing happened, which it did. Nothing occurred to me of any importance though so I was glad I took pictures of nothing important occurring otherwise there'd have been nothing to write about at all.

It was wet, it was miserable and it was utterly dull. The float just sat there promising to move without delivering.

Without pictures that would have been the size of the blog...

I wished I'd taken the dogs along just to annoy me. Molly would have gone in and woke the fish up. Oscar would have eaten all the bait whilst I wasn't looking forcing me off early. I would have had pictures of something more interesting than my own glum boat looking at a float.

This morning I took the dogs out lure fishing for pike. I couldn't fail to have something doing with a spinner and two springers in tow. That's a recipe for some kind of success, surely?

Well I didn't catch a thing except an endless succession of various bits of crap off the bottom, one of which felt so much like a pike bite that I struck it and carried on pretending for a while that a carrier bag full of water really was a thirty pounder because it felt just as heavy and ponderous as any dead one would. At least Oscar who's very young and wet behind the ears took a shine to the spinners and tried every cast to grab them mid-air, which was very entertaining for ten minutes but a royal pain in the arse thereafter.

Tomorrow I'm off to the river for a spot of roach fishing, a place where where nothing doing is very unlikely what with the stretch in question stuffed bank to bank with fish of all species ravenously hungry after not seeing angler's baits since November time and queuing up for mine.

I shall shoot lots and lots of pictures though, just in case...