I’m a man on a mission this morning. My aim is to try a rig with minimal resistance to try and combat the really tentative bites I am getting. What I’m doing is using a short link leger which slides up and down the line with only the absolute minimum of shot to enable me to hold bottom.

As I walk the riverbank I see that the river is up from last time and is so coloured I can not see the bottom anywhere. I don’t know whether this will be a problem or not; we shall see.

My favourite swim is a far bank slack and with the extra water on the river should be perfect for a fish or two today. When I arrive however I see that recent high winds have blown a tree down and it is lying in the river in exactly the worst possible place - right across the slack! This is a bit disastrous because I cannot cast directly into the slack water from where I normally fish and have to move down-stream and make an upstream cast into the water behind the trailing tree branches. It’ll be a hit-and-hold should I get a take but I’m very confident in the Drennan Acolyte and six pound line in bullying it out.

I make the cast and the bait (hair-rigged cheese-paste) lands in the right spot, right behind those branches; I must get a fish, it looks perfect! I discover an immediate problem however. Although the single SSG shot leger lands in the slack water and holds comfortably, the water this side of the ‘crease’ is moving quite fast and with the extra water due to recent rain is causing quite a bow in the line. The vagaries of the current set the quiver-tip pulsing to and fro and it is very difficult to see anything but the most positive of bites.

I throw some bits of cheese-paste into the slack and although I give it a good hour I have nothing positive to strike at. Once or twice I get small ‘ping-back’ indications - the line suddenly goes slack, and I strike at them, but fail to connect. I move downstream to other locations.

The character of the river is different today; it’s almost like fishing another river. The extra water and obscured clarity mean that swims I would normally pass by because they are too shallow and I can see the bottom, now become possible fish holding areas. I try a few of them but constantly come up against the problem of gross movements of the quiver-tip making it virtually impossible to see what I am suspecting are very tentative indications.

There are one or two sharp, tiny pulls on the tip and I strongly suspect they are fish but my answering strikes do not hook a fish. Time to walk on down to ‘The Pylon’ swim. This is a favourite swim of mine and is also a far bank slack. It is the very furthest I am prepared to walk on this stretch of the river. There is free fishing all the way down to the bridge but it means negotiating a real ‘jungle’ and the streamer weed gets denser and denser the further down you go. This is the last unfished swim of the day before I make my way back up to the top of the stretch.

Once again there are problems with bite indication and I decide to change my rig to the same running ledger I caught fish on last time. This change results in me being able to not only hold firm in the far bank slack but to tension the line to obviate the vagaries of the current. I am now staring at a tip that is rock steady and I can see every little twitch.

I change the bait to ‘Stickybaits Krill Paste’ and throw a few 10mm Krill boilies over into the slack and almost immediately I start getting very tentative knocks on the tip. Experimentally I strike at one and find myself connected! This is only a small fish that weighs two pounds nine ounces - but I’m very satisfied with it on a day that I find very difficult.

I hang on here in the hope of another fish but not for the first time, one fish per swim seems to be all the river is prepared to offer and I once again move back upstream, re-visiting the swims I fished on the way down.

There are no more bites in any of them other than very tentative plucks and nods on the tip.

In the car on the way home, inspiration! To turn shy bites into something more positive - fish smaller hooks (and baits). Too late. The session is gone. Should have thought of it earlier.