Most anglers look at a river coming up after the first autumn rain and decide to stay at home. I look at the same river and start getting my gear together, because chub genuinely thrive in those conditions and a flooded autumn river can produce the best chub fishing of the year.
The trick is knowing that everything about how you fish changes when the water rises. Same species, different game.
What the fish do when the river comes up
A chub does not fight the current, it avoids it. When a river rises and pushes through, chub move out of the main flow and into anywhere the water is slower. That means the inside of bends, behind fallen trees, tight under the bank, in slacks and eddies, and into water so shallow and close in that you would walk straight past it in summer.
I have caught good chub in eighteen inches of water two feet from the bank while the middle of the river was unfishable. If you take one thing from this piece, it is to fish closer than you think.
Colour is your friend
Coloured water makes chub bold. They lose the caution that makes them so difficult in low clear summer conditions and they will sit in open water and feed where normally they would need cover. It also means you can get away with heavier line and cruder presentation, which matters when you are fishing near snags with fish that go straight for them.
The one thing colour costs you is visibility, so bait choice shifts towards things that smell.
Baits for coloured autumn water
Cheese paste is the classic and it is classic for a reason. It puts out a strong scent trail, it stays on the hook in pushy water, and big chub love it. I make mine with a strong cheese worked into a bread base until it is stiff enough to stay put but soft enough to come off the hook on the strike.
Lobworms are excellent in flood water, particularly because the rising water washes worms into the river and the fish are expecting them. A big lump of luncheon meat is hard to beat and it survives being fished in current.
Bread is my other standard, either a big pinch of flake on a size 4 or crust fished on the surface in the calmer slacks. In coloured water I go for scent first and visibility second.
Keep it simple with the tackle
Autumn chub fishing is not the place for finesse. I use a straight lead, enough of it to hold bottom in the flow, a short hooklength and a strong hook. Twelve pound mainline is not excessive when you are fishing a snag with a five pound fish that will bury itself the second it feels the hook.
Touch legering is the method I come back to. Rod low, line over your fingers, feeling for the pull. In coloured pushy water you often feel the bite before any indicator would show it.
Move, do not wait
The single biggest change I would ask anyone to make is to stop fishing one swim all day. Autumn chub fishing is a roving game. Bait a swim, give it twenty minutes, and if nothing happens go to the next. I will fish eight or ten swims in a session and I will bait a couple ahead of me so they have had time to settle when I get there.
Chub give themselves away quickly. If they are there and feeding, you know inside quarter of an hour.
Safety, because this actually matters
A flooded river is dangerous and it is worth saying plainly. Banks that were solid in summer get undercut and give way. Water moves faster than it looks. Do not wade, do not fish alone in serious flood conditions if you can avoid it, and tell someone where you are going. No fish is worth it and rivers claim anglers every winter.
The session I would fish
Two days after heavy rain, with the river up but starting to drop and carrying good colour. Bag with bait, a rod, a net and a set of scales. Walk a stretch you know, fishing the slacks and the inside of every bend, twenty minutes a swim. Cheese paste on one rod and nothing else in the bag but worms and meat as a change. Home by dark. That is as good as coarse fishing gets.
Dan Whitfield started fishing aged seven on the canal at the end of his road and never really stopped. He spent his twenties and thirties on the match circuit – club level rather than national – before deciding he’d rather catch one decent fish than a net of small ones.
These days he mostly fishes the River Trent for barbel (personal best 14lb 2oz), the Oxford Canal for roach and skimmers in winter, and the occasional gravel pit when tench are spawning and the surface fishing is too good to miss. He’s a former club secretary and still helps with junior coaching at his local angling club in Nottingham.
At The River Bend, Dan writes the coarse species guides, river fishing technique articles, and the match and pole content.
Covers: Barbel, bream, roach, tench, carp (coarse context), river fishing, canal fishing, feeder, float, match/pole