River Kennet, Avington Estate

I enjoyed a relaxing and entertaining day at the Avington Estate fishery on the River Kennet last week. My visit was at the kind invitation of Bjorn whose club has access to the water there. The fishery comprises a labyrinthian complex of the Kennet and its twisting carriers. It was quite easy to feel 'lost' in a very pleasant way.

I drove through a tremendous downpour on the M4 motorway on the way there but the rain fortunately held off for the rest of the day. 

I parked at the very private Denford end of the fishery and from the moment I switched off my diesel engine I felt completely consumed by the venue.  At first, the appearance of silence, but then the natural sounds of the place came into focus: a cuckoo called incessantly from the trees near the main river whilst the little wren prominently led the regular chorus of forest birds, ably deputised by the blackbird, chiffchaff and warbler. 

At the rudimentary hut I watched a nuthatch, streamlined in shape, probe the bark of a nearby tree for food. I don't see them very often. When we set off down a mown path towards one of the carriers a muntjac deer bounded away from us over the tall sedge grasses. Bjorn also spotted a water vole in a ditch beside the path, but it was gone before I could see it. Having been in wall to wall motorway traffic not long before, this was paradise.

The rules of the fishery are dry fly only and this made the job of catching trout most difficult. The water was very clear and we could see the trout quite easily as they lay on the chalky riverbed, swishing their tails contentedly and at times animatedly feeding on nymphs. Convincing them to rise to the surface was another matter! Despite a healthy hatch of olive duns and a profuse number of hawthorn flies in the air, the trout predominantly preferred to stay in the deep. We are still to reach the conditions which encourage trout to throw caution to the wind and feed freely from the surface.  

I caught a little chub with a dry fly and a little later in the morning we came upon a trout rising in a fast riffle section of the river, which I duly caught with a small parachute Adams. It was a lovely wild brown trout, perhaps a descendant of the legendary "greenback" variety of Kennet trout.   

 

 

I succeeded in tempting another trout to take my fly before the afternoon, this time a stocked fish, which gave a rather poor account of itself. For the most part, though, it was a case of 'window shopping' only. After three hours we had circled back to the hut at the car park where we shared a scotch egg and ate sandwiches.

We strolled down to the Avington section after lunch and joined the main river at the upstream point of the water available to us. The Kennet here is a fairly big river by chalkstream standards and we followed it downstream, on the lookout for rising fish. We found one at last, but it was rising near a willow tree on the opposite bank where a syndicate member was casting to it. The Avington fishery is the preserve of a syndicate of members ("dead man's shoes" was how one of them described it to us) shared by an arrangement with Bjorn's club. The member waved cheerily to us from the far bank and we thought it impolite to hang around and see if he was successful in landing the rising fish.

We stopped to look inside the grand fishing hut. We met another member inside who said it had once been a cricket pavilion, which was dismantled and reassembled in its present position. The hut's dark wood panelled interior, cased trout and framed photos of memorable catches over the years lent a sense of history to the venue. During this time, an extremely large trout was rising with the frequency of a metronome in the water opposite the front door of the hut, right where a 'no fishing' sign was prominently displayed. The fish easily went north of 4 lbs. More window shopping for us! 

A little way downstream - fishing now permitted - we encountered a trout rising beside a solitary willow. It was Bjorn's turn and he duly hooked the trout with a balloon caddis pattern. The trout thrashed about the surface and then stripped his line with a brute, unsustainable power. When his tippet inevitably parted Bjorn was crestfallen. I asked him how large he thought the trout was and he replied 3 or 4 lbs (but by the time we returned to the hut and spoke with the syndicate members, I noted that his estimate had been revised to 6 lbs!).

Rather than flog the water blindly with a dry fly we preferred to hunt for rising trout. We covered a lot of distance - there are 13 miles of water at the fishery - but saw none, until the very end, when I cast a Griffith's Gnat to the fish and succeeded in drawing a large snout to break the water's surface and consume my fly. I hadn't expected the trout to do it facing downstream and when I struck in the usual fashion, above my right shoulder, downstream, I must've snatched the fly away from the fish's mouth. The trout couldn't be tempted to rise again.   

Bjorn had a dinner engagement and I had a long drive home, so we stopped fishing at around 5.30pm, just when a member said "things are about to get interesting." Oh to live beside a chalkstream and to fish to the last of the light! This was a lovely day, spent on a lovely piece of water.