Chris Yates: Did I hook the superchub? I’ll never know...
A friend of mine, Mem ‘Jardine’ Hassan, had a ticket for a stretch of the Hampshire Avon that was only ever fished by salmon anglers.
Jardine was keen to catch an Avon salmon, but the days of the big spring fish were over and the only real opportunities lay in the summer, when the grilse were running. This, of course, meant that he often packed a barbel or chub rod when he went salmon fishing; as he was searching for the ‘silver tourists’, he would often stumble on a shoal of ‘natives’. And one July day he stumbled on a fish so big that he thought his eyes must be deceiving him. But he wasn’t seeing things. I’m certain of that because I saw the monster too.
We had been half-heartedly looking for a salmon during the early morning, but there wasn’t a sign of even a small grilse in all the usual holding pools. There was a wide stretch of shallows that ran suddenly into a deeper narrower glide and we knew from previous experience that a shoal of barbel would be waiting for us there. So we put away our salmon gear, tackled up our proper rods and sneaked into position through the willow herb. We began feeding maggots into the swim and Jardine peered through the cover to see if we were attracting anything. I tossed in another handful upstream of him and as the maggots sank something emerged from the weedbeds.
“Blimming heck!” gasped Jardine, and he turned to me with his jaw dropped and his eyes toggled.
“What is it?” I whispered, not being able to see clearly through the undergrowth. Jardine crawled of the hole he’d made in the willow herb and said: “Have a look for yourself. You won’t believe it!”
I inched forward until I had a clear view into the swim, put on my polarising glasses, blinked and said: “It must be a carp! No, it looks like a bass! No, it’s a clonking great chub!”
Now I have seen a couple of very big chub before, even if the biggest I’ve caught was ‘only’ 5½lb. I reckon, in the distant past, that I must have seen a seven-pounder, but this Avon fish was much, much bigger. Both Jardine and I reckon it must have been almost 30 inches long and would have weighed 10lb easily. It was definitely picking off one or two maggots as they drifted past and we got a clearer idea of its dimensions when it was suddenly joined by several barbel that looked in the 6lb to 7lb category. The chub dwarfed them all!
Unlike the graceful quick finned barbel, the monster seemed cumbersome, even awkward in its movements. It looked an ancient specimen and the large scales had a rough-edged, slightly irregular appearance. It dropped lower in the water, as if dragged down by its great weight.
We both crawled away out of sight and Jardine feverishly set up float tackle while I tossed in a few more maggots. Then he cast from a few yards upstream and we honestly thought he was going to hook the chub straight away. It was such a unexpected surprise, in such an accessible spot that it surely meant that our luck was in and we were destined to break the record. But of course Jardine didn’t hook the chub. The first fish he caught was one of the barbel, a six-pounder that seemed awfully small compared to the giant. He graciously let me have a cast and a bit of trundled luncheon meat produced an instant lunging take. “Is it him?” asked Jardine. “No,” I said, seeing the streamlined form of a barbel spearing itself into the weed. It was the one we thought had weighed about 7lb – and we were, after a bit of a tussle, proved almost right: 6lb 14oz.
Naturally, after that the chub disappeared and we didn’t see it again. But we guessed it hadn’t gone far into the dense weedbeds and continued fishing, hopefully, for the rest of the day. The barbel were in an eager frame of mind and we caught seven by sunset on maggots, meat and sweetcorn.
Every time one of the rods bent into a fish our hearts skipped a few beats with the thought that, this time, it might be superchub; but it never was. However, just as the light was fading in the west, I hooked a big fish after dropping a bait right across the river into a narrow gap in the weeds.
It ploughed off downstream and eventually came to an unbudgeable stop. I tried every trick in the book to shift it, but finally the hook sprang free.
It just might have been…