Anker Flood fishing

I had the morning off from work today but was due to be visiting a site in Birmingham in the afternoon, so not one to pass up an opportunity to fish, I decided to try the River Anker again. As it is not far from where I live it meant I could spend a reasonable amount of the morning there.
I got up at 6 and was on the bank before first light about 6.45am. The weather was calm a bit overcast and cool but not freezing. The river however was in flood again and there were only three pegs I could reach.
The water was the usual flood brown but had obviously fined down a bit since the deluge at the weekend and the banks were still sodden from the receded water.

I set up my feeder rod first with the intention of Roach fishing using breadflake on a size 10 hook and a small cage feeder filled each cast with some grated bread and some leftover maggots from last weeks trip (they keep well in the fridge if its cold enough). I used 6lb straight through fiquring that the Roach would not be too line shy in these conditions as the would only be able to smell and not see, also if a chub took the bait I had a better chance of landing it in the stronger flow than on a 2lb hook length.

The swim in front of me had a nice steady flow, slowed by a bush upstream 10 yards to my right and the edge of the crease it caused was probably two rod lengths out to the main flow.
I tried several casts here but never registered a bite. On checking the water temp I decided to set the Barbel rod up too, as the temp and conditions were about perfect. With a steady 8 degC of flood water pushing through it was too good an opportunity to miss. I lobbed out some flavored meat on a 3 oz lead which held relatively well in the flow , only dislodging when too much leaef and weed litter built up on the line after 15 min's or so. Not that it did me any good as I received no bites to this rod all morning either.


After trying the other two accesable swims downstream later on in the morning, I finally packed up about 10 o'clock, in time to get home an get ready for my site meeting in Birmingham at 1:50pm.
So you can imagine what I thought when I got there and found out it had been cancelled !! To think I could have stayed fishing those brilliant Barbel conditions all day, who knows what might have prevailed ?