River Thames - Pixey's Meadow, Oxfordshire

[Maceo]

Tried this out on Friday, for a longish session starting around 6am. It's quite a tough location to get to, involving some gate climbing and a fair walk from the nearest parking.

It was a beautiful morning, sunny and with mist rolling all along the river. The downside is that it's near the busy A34 dual carriageway. Many of the pegs have a lot of trees and bushes around, so I chose one that was more open and quite a way from the noise of the road.

After a couple of hours I hadn't had a lot of luck - couple of small roach and a medium-sized perch and I was reduced to feeding little balls of groundbait to the hundreds of tiny tiddlers in the margins! The river is very deep along this stretch - maybe 5 metres or more, even close by the edge. It's also wider than at Newbridge. That made it difficult to fish on a waggler float.

I decided to move up the river towards the road bridge more and found another spot which looked good, but was more surrounded by trees. On my first cast I caught the tree behind me and cast my float out into the middle of the river without any line attached. That didn't improve my humour!

After a while I started catching some reasonable size roach and small chub using sweetcorn on the hook and handfuls of hemp thrown in. The bites kept up pretty solidly all afternoon, with mainly roach up to around 0.5 kg. Unfortunately there was a lot of boat traffic buzzing up and down and some making big waves, which must account for the banks being worn away and crumbling so much.

With the depth of the water here and the constant roar of the traffic, I'm not sure I'll bother going back to this spot in a hurry. Quite good fishing, but peace and quiet is one of the most important factors I look for in a day's fishing.

[BoldBear]

Great report, brings back magic memories of when I used to fish the Thames with my father when I was much younger.

I remember the days when my father and I used to be on the upper/middle Thames at around 4 or 5 0-clock in the morning after visiting a local bakery on the way to get a large bag of fresh crumbs for groundbait; with the mist slowly rising off the water and the sun rising and the Roach feeding well by the rushes and the sounds of woodcocks and the odd cuckoo and with the occasional distant car breaking the peace where an early bird was making his or her way to work in the distance, and the occasional distant church bells ringing, before most people had even thought about getting out of bed. what glorious days they were.

Perhaps you can take a couple of shots of the river where you are fishing, it sounds very nice especially the shallower more narrower stretches like Newbridge.

[Maceo]

Hi Bold Bear - here's a photo of the area at Newbridge which I enjoy fishing most. It's a really pretty area as you can see. I usually go one field further upstream from where this one is taken, so you can't hear the traffic noise from the bridge you can see in the distance. There are two pubs up by this bridge - just handy for parking the car and for having a pint before heading home after a session.




Normally there are the same number of fishermen there as you can see in the photo. I've seen one other person fishing in the last half dozen trips - and that was a junior. Usually I have it all to myself.

I find it a bit bizarre to be honest that the Thames is so ignored. I've just got an old book, published in 1968, from the library called 'Freshwater Fishing the Upper Thames' by someone called Bill Taylor. In those days they used to run coach trips to fish the area and it seems like many of the riverside pubs were proper angling haunts that sold day tickets (usually costing around 3/6!), had a landlord giving local advice and even hired tents and caravans along the river to fishermen. As I say, nowdays, it seems pretty much deserted. Carp fishing seems to have killed a lot of river fishing. Oh well, all the better for us that go down there I suppose!

Here's a quote from the 1968 book about the area which sums up what I like about fishing the Thames:-

"The river from Newbridge to Northmoor lock is renowned for its roach fishing, but also holds the usual run of Thames fish, including of recent years, large bream. I remember one rather quiet day fishing there with Bert Lewis (Not sure who he was - maybe the 'Matt Hayes' of 1968?) of Oxford. I visited his swim to see how he was making out.

I do not think I have ever seen such a disconsolate angler. He sat there examining his broken line and unfortunately I missed the action which led to the 'smash up' by a fraction of a minute.

Finding the roach hard to please, he was fishing very lightly with an 18 hook and single maggot in a very deep run. His float dipped and on striking he felt what he took to be a gudgeon. As he reeled it in it was snatched by a very large fish which he then played for some time. Suddenly the water parted and a huge trout (possibly 10lb) showed itself momentarily before disappearing with this terminal tackle, float and all. Anything can happen on the Thames!"