Fishing the River Stour (West Midlands)

Last year I had a couple of attempts at fishing the River Stour at Stourton (by the old Stewpony) - the BAA have the rights to this stretch. When I say attempts, I did actually fish twice but blanked both times. The river was very shallow and narrow, almost like a stream so I decided never to bother again! If only I had done a little research, read a few other blogs and perhaps looked at the history of the River Stour rather than being ignorant and condemning this to my list of rubbish marks.

A year on and I hear from a friend, who heard from someone else (bare with me) that the Stour is fishing really well at the moment, producing some nice chub and barbel up to 3lb and even some trout! 'Rubbish' i thought. There's no way people are catching fish like that from what I remember to be a piddly little stream. The friend of a friend was referring to the area around Wolverley and to be honest I never even knew the Stour ran through there so I loaded google maps and followed the river down from Stourton to Wolverley. To my surprise I had driven over it many a time without even realising and to be fair it looked really good from the satellite view, so the next day I set up a light float rod for trotting and off I went...



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I fished a few areas around the outside edge of the river you can see above. I'm not sure if anyone owns the rights and as there were no signs I just went for it! The putting green does have some purpose built stages which I believe you can fish for a few quid per day provided they are open.
The water was fairly fast flowing in parts with plenty of little eddies. It was not particularly deep, say around 1-2 feet for the majority although there were deeper pockets and there were some weedy areas. Towards the right of the map just out of sight there's a row of over hanging trees which makes this stretch quite dark. In the hour and a half I fished (light was running out!) I caught a few descent roach and dace.
To summarise, this is a great area for a spot of stalking and I shall certainly be back to venture further down river despite vowing never to fish the River Stour again!

Time/ Date: 19:30 (approx), 12/08/13
Tackle: Light Float Rod, Fixed Spool Reel (4lb mono), Trotting Float
Fish: Roach, Dace