Specimen Series - Roach Fishing - Trotting the Avon with Phil Spinks

I started the first day of my Hampshire Avon trip by keeping things simple, trotting double maggot on a size 16 hook beneath an Avon stick float. From the very first trot it was obvious just how many fish were present, and to begin with I was more than happy to play the numbers game. I fed the swim little and often, kept the float running through cleanly, and just enjoyed what was shaping up to be some incredible river roach fishing.

One of the reasons I love this style of fishing so much is because it demands skill. Constantly mending the line, guiding the float, and watching it glide perfectly through the swim before dipping away is challenging and hugely rewarding. When it all comes together and the bites keep coming, there’s really nothing quite like it.

Using maggots, I was getting bites on almost every trot, but the specimen hunter in me was already starting to whisper in my ear. I knew that switching to a larger hook and using bread flake, along with liquidised bread as feed, would almost certainly give me a better chance at one of the big ones. However, it would also mean fewer bites overall.

In the end, at least for that first morning, I stuck with the maggots. It wasn’t really part of the plan, but the fishing was just too addictive. When you’re getting bite after bite on a river like this, it’s very hard to change away from something that’s working so well.

Roach have got to be one of my favourite winter species. I’ve done a lot of stillwater fishing for them back at home on Homersfield Lake, catching some truly enormous roach from gravel pits, but there’s something extra special about catching them on the float from a river.

If I can catch roach over a pound fishing like this, I’m a very happy man. The fish in the Avon were absolutely fin-perfect too, immaculate roach in stunning condition, and that just adds another layer of magic to the whole experience.

Like so many rivers across the country, the River Avon has faced its fair share of problems over the years. Pollution, abstraction, flooding and predation have all taken their toll, and there was a time when the roach stocks here were in serious decline. There were sections of the river with no roach left at all.

Standing on the bank today, watching float after float dip away to another roach, it’s hard to imagine just how bad things once were. But the health of the river and the quality of its fishing didn’t happen by accident, and that became very clear when I met the amazing man responsible for this river's recovery.

One of the real privileges of this trip was meeting Trevor Harrop, the man behind the Avon Roach Project. He is the reason the roach have returned to the river and are now thriving, and listening to him explain how it all came about was fascinating.

Trevor made it clear that before a single fish could be restocked, he needed to understand exactly why the roach had declined in the first place. As he put it, there’s no point releasing fish into a river that can’t support them. His work began by identifying the real causes of the problem and then tackling those issues head-on.

After that inspiring conversation with Trevor, it felt like the right time to finally step things up and have a proper go for a bigger fish. I swapped my size 16 hook for a size 10, changed over to bread flake, and fished a slightly heavier setup.

I used a 4lb mainline straight through to a 3.5lb hooklength and a 3g Avon float. Rather than spreading shot down the line, I opted for a 3g olivette to cock the float, with just a couple of small droppers below to help the bait settle naturally. It’s a setup I’ve used many times on rivers and one that gives excellent control when trotting.

Although I did manage a few fish on the bread flake, they didn’t seem to be any bigger than the roach I’d been catching earlier on maggots, and I was also missing far more bites. With the light starting to drop and prime roach time approaching, something told me it was time to go back to what had been producing all day.

That decision paid off almost immediately. Just a few trots after switching back to maggots, the float vanished completely and I connected with the best roach of the session, a cracking fish of 1lb 1oz. It was a proper Avon roach and more than made the change worthwhile, and I still had time to catch more!

I returned to the Avon the following day to much colder conditions, with a heavy frost greeting us first thing in the morning. We explored several areas further upstream, but none of them seemed to hold the same concentration of fish as the water close to the weir from day one.

In the end, we found ourselves back in that same productive swim, and even had the chance to fish alongside Trevor himself for a couple of hours. It felt like a fitting way to end a brilliant couple of days on the river.