A little bit later that planned, some gremlins in the works but all sorted now. From a frosty Foxford, Happy New year to you all, lets hope it is a good one for all of us. It’s a strange but nice time of year. The madness of the Christmas has passed, the days are getting a little longer and there is hope for the year ahead. At the same time, I’m asking myself is it really 2025, where did 2024 go. It did seem to slip by fast but hey we are here now and its time to look forward.
I said before Christmas that I was not going to get caught up in the Christmas madness and as far as possible I did manage to avoid it. Apart from a visit to a good friend on Christmas morning I don’t believe I was in another house and apart from eating breakfast, drying wet gear and sleeping I wasn’t in my own.
New Year’s Eve was spent pike fishing on a windswept riverbank. When I say wind swept, I am not joking. It was a bonus day, we had been watching the forecast and we knew there was heavy rain on the way that would put the river we wanted to fish out of order. The rain was forecast for Monday evening and our fear was that the river would be well up by early Tuesday. When we woke on Tuesday morning it was blowing hard but not very wet, we decided to give it a go. When we arrived at the river it was obvious that there had been more rain than we thought. The roads were flooded and there was water lying in the fields, the river itself looked ok. It was one of those mornings where the car doors are cautiously opened one at a time to avoid the contents (mostly empty coffee cups) being blown all over the place. It was windy but the river looked ok and we were there. Sometimes on a nasty day, the hardest thing is to motivate oneself to get prepared and go for it.
Im not going to give you a blow-by-blow account, we did have a nice days fishing but it was cold. We choose the wrong bank and the wind was directly in our face for the day. At 4pm we trudged our way through flooded fields back to the car. The river had crept up during the day and we were not a minute too soon getting out of there. We laughed and joked about the headlines if we had to be rescued. We were happy and all the “important” stuff like new years eve were forgotten about. There’s more to fishing than catching fish.