The English coarse river close season, running from mid-March to mid-June, catches new anglers out every year – not because the dates are secret, but because it’s easy to forget just how much of your usual fishing suddenly becomes unavailable when it arrives.
What I actually do during those three months is shift entirely to stillwaters, which have no statutory coarse close season. Commercial fisheries, club lakes, and gravel pits all remain fair game, and honestly, late spring on a stillwater – as tench and bream start feeding hard pre-spawn – is some of my favourite fishing of the year. I’d go so far as to say the close season pushed me toward stillwater fishing I might otherwise have neglected in favour of always defaulting to rivers.
It’s also when I do the tackle maintenance and preparation I otherwise put off – respooling reels, sorting through the tackle box, tying up rigs in bulk for the season ahead. Not glamorous, but it means the river season, when it reopens in mid-June, starts with everything actually ready rather than being sorted out reactively on the bank.
Some anglers use the close season to travel for stillwater-only sessions somewhere new, since it removes the temptation to default back to a familiar home river. If you’ve never used the close season as an excuse to properly explore stillwater fishing, it’s worth treating as an opportunity rather than purely an inconvenience.
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