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Writer's pictureGraham Howard

16/11/24 - Junior Points Match #12 - Colber, River Stour, Sturminster Newton (SHAA)



I felt a bit giddy as I followed our guest coach through the gates at Colber. The hope of hosting a junior session on running water had finally come to fruition, and we were squelching our way across a very soggy field.


Ah the delights of natural water fishing…


I put signs out to direct the cars across the high ground. Sadly, Captain Chris didn’t get the memo and was soon up to his wing mirrors in wet muddy grass. There was a bit of pushing and shoving, but nothing seemed to work. It wasn’t until Si Wag leaned his wallet against the back of Chris’s car that it started to move. Nothing can resist that kind of weight.

It was a disaster averted and now armed with experience I left Chris in charge of the parking arrangements.

I was keen to get a look at the office for the day, so I followed our guest coach to the wet bit.


Simon Dennis from Sturminster and Hinton Angling Association (SHAA) is a knowledgeable river angler and, so it turns out, a thoroughly nice chap. Because I’ve been doing this coaching lark a while, I had kind of forgotten how anxious it makes you as you try to show young eyes just what a venue can offer.

Simon did a brilliant job, explaining all about ground baits, hook baits and feeding. After looking at some rigs, it was time to walk the walk after talking the talk.

The balls went it (cheeky!) and a few murdered worms. I remember joking that we were about to find out what kind of day the juniors could expect. As the words left my lips I wondered if they may return to haunt me.

The float sat there, gently meandering its way down in the current. It seemed stubbornly resistant to being submerged as time after time it simply refused to disappear. Eventually it dipped, Simon expertly nailed it and a micro Gudgeon popped out with it’s mouth rammed full with a single Pinkie…


Oh dear…


Amongst the collective sound of ‘Goby Celebrations’ I had a feeling of dread because it was a very small Gonk indeed…


With time running short, I discharged the shrimps away to their pegs (Drawn the day before), Simon carried on fishing to eventually catch a ‘proper’ palm sized Roach and a similar sized Perch. They were there, it would just take patience.


The over riding feeling of the day was something like ‘How deep?’…

The juniors had never seen a place like this before. All of a sudden, the crazy long rigs and big floats made sense as plummets were lowered down, down, down into a seeming bottomless river. We were seeing depths of close to 12 feet (4-metres) and further upstream the river was even deeper. The only place I had seen deeper than this was a farm reservoir near Luton 35ft in the middle, and the Gloucester Canal (no one has ever found the bottom of that!). Depths like that mean long 5-metre top kits that are hard to manage for juniors. But this is very reason that I wanted to bring the Shrimps to the Stour. Cupping in balls of groundbait, big floats, long top kits and deep, deep water. It was nothing like they had ever experienced before, and it was wonderful to see them doing something so far outside their comfort zone. I knew it would test them, and it did. But how much? Well, I’ll tell you…


The draw puked up the following numbers:

Peg 1: Harry ‘The Piking Pirate’ Cryer.

Peg 2: Jack ‘Where are they?’ Cryer.

Peg 3: Josh ‘The wrecker of rigs’ Roe.

Peg 4: Alec ‘You can stick fishing at 10-metres mate’ Campbell.

Peg 5: Mia ‘The Queen of multitasking’ Evans.

Peg 6: Austin ‘A bridge too far’ Scott-Kennedy.

Peg 7: Jack ‘The Perching Pirate’ Copp.


Your skid-mark of coaches (The correct collective noun for a group of five angling coaches) today were:

‘Howard’ – Graham Howard (Obviously)

‘Gary’ – Jerry Bracey

‘Robbie’ – Jon Bass

‘Mark’ -Si Wagner

‘Jason’ – Chris Ward

(You can blame Mrs H for this list, because it’s on full blast from the bedroom with her ‘singing’ as loud as her putrefied lungs will let her!)


What follows is a tale of woe and despair. But please remember these are anglettes that have mostly never seen a river this close, let alone fished one. There was a lot of learning going on and they had no practice to lean on.


Peg One:

Harry Cryer:

Harry the meat was in a stunning looking peg that absolutely screamed fish. A monster raft of ‘rubbish’, tree branches, and collected debris sat downstream and looked ripe for extracting fish from. Fresh from a great tutorial, Harry had baited up and was now waiting for the fish to arrive. They didn’t.

Well, to be fair, a few did. But he would find out why later on…

As we approached Harry’s swim to weigh him in, I heard the words ‘I wonder how many it's eaten?’

That’s either one hell of a Perch, or the croc of the river. A Pike…

It was the latter and, we weighed it despite it being ineligible for inclusion in the match.

It went 3lbs 9ozs, leaving Harry with a poultry 13ozs to show for his efforts.

Because of circumstances, this meagre offering would land Harry 15 points for 4th place on the day…


Peg Two:

Jack Cryer:

Jack had the full attention of all the coaches at one point or another during the day. Simon had drawn Jack’s peg before during matches and tried to help as much as possible. Short of chucking Jack off his box and fishing himself, I don’t think Simon could have done much more. He was being bombarded with advice from all angles until his head was ready to explode. But nothing was going to help Jack avoid the blank today.

No fish means no points. A sad end to a much-anticipated event but, that’s fishing.


Peg Three:

Josh Roe:

Having lungs as useful as a chocolate fire guard doesn’t help getting the Fiery Chipmunk to his fishing matches. Martin was feeling like toilet brush made from wet spaghetti, so the Lead Coach stepped in to save the day. The only problem I had was the luminescent glow of so much Matrix tackle in the back of my car. It was very distracting…

Despite not having his usual support team with him, Josh was ready for the river. Like Jack, the river was not going to be kind to Jamie’s nephew.

I personally re-plumbed the depth about halfway through the match and found the bottom to be all over the place. It was chaos down there and very difficult work out.

The river seemed to have carved a channel diagonally across itself creating a steep slope in what you would have expected to be a straight run. With branches and snags below the tree opposite him, Josh was going to struggle.

I don’t know whether it was frustration or what, but Josh trashed more rigs than anyone else in the history of angling. It’s a good job that I have a strange fetish for rig tying. It was probably because the rigs were so long, or the fact that I need to have a coaching session to show the COACHES how to remove carefully wound rigs from their winders!!!

I was a little disappointed that Josh threw his fish back before the end, but I can understand why.


Peg Four:

Alec Campbell:

I hadn’t realised at the start of the day that Alec was not on top form. But after sitting with him and Ian for a while, understood what was going on. I won’t go into details but there was a good reason for why there was a reluctance to fish with a long pole today.

When anxiety is high the best thing to do, in my opinion, is to catch fish. I grabbed a bait dropper, and we popped some worms into the short line that Alec was reduced to.

He'd already caught one or two fish and, within a few minutes, a large slightly battered Roach was in the landing net. Alec proceeded to catch steadily throughout the day and finished up with a nice collection of fish at the end to weight 3lbs 3ozs for a well earned second place.

No one, apart from Ian, knows what it takes for Alec to drag himself to the junior events each time. But to whatever it is that encourages Alec to crush his anxieties enough to come fishing with us, I am truly grateful.

I am proud of you, well done…


Peg 5:

Mia Evans:

'Dotty' was drawn just below Colber bridge and, unlike some, had a nice straight run through her swim. I helped her set up and plumb the depth etc. I assisted her in feeding the balls of ground bait at the start, and it was only then that I properly realised just how alien this kind of fishing was to our juniors. Those lovely, light, easy to manage top kits were replaced with unwieldy, long, cumbersome tools with ridiculous amounts of line to cope with a comparatively bottomless river.

At the start, I gave Mia her top kit to bait up whilst I organised her roost. We talked about how the rig is laid into the water and how to run the float through. With no immediate bites it was only then that she decided to reveal that the hook was yet to be baited, and then looked at me like I was the idiot!

I’m starting to reconsider my comment that girls are easier to teach than boys…

With 20 minutes to go and with only a smattering of tiny fish in the net (she may have caught more if she wasn’t showing off with her multitasking skills. Talking and fishing), Mia mentioned that she was yet to try worms on the hook. Now it was my turn to look at her like she was the plank. We popped a late worm on in the vane hope of an incredibly patient Perch, but it wasn’t to be. Mia finished the match with a rather lowly 4ozs. But, because of the blanks, she wasn’t last…


Peg 6:

Austin Scott Kennedy:

I was with Mia when a loud splosh came from the direction of the bridge.

A feeder was inching its way up towards the handrail where it looped over the rail one way and then twice as fast back the other. Now airborne again, it made like a squirrel and sat in the tree. Dad Tom had a good go at getting it back and, still nostalgic for his previous life as a hardcore gangster rapper, had his pants fully on show. At least they were clean this time. Three crows, two squirrels and a sheep needed therapy the last time they appeared.

Naturally, the marksman on peg 6 had not been catching enough in his own peg, and thought he would try Mia’s instead. It’s just a shame that some idiot saw fit to put a bridge in his way.

Austin learned the lesson to never quote the weight you think you might have and I won’t embarrass him by revealing the number he whispered to me beforehand. Suffice to say it was a tad optimistic. A small gathering of Gudgeon and a few silver ones gave Austin 14ozs at the weigh in. Staggeringly this was good enough for 3rd on the day.

It’s probably fair to say that Austin had one hand on the title and, barring an apocalypse, he should wrap it up next weekend.


Peg 7:

Jack Copp:

After the last match at Whitemoor, I prayed that the determined Jack would turn up today, and not the wandering Jack that I was surprised to see at Chester’s Lake.

There was a bit of complaining about a giant snag (Probably a submerged tree limb) that was hindering his progress. Due to a misunderstanding about the pegging at the beginning, the match did end up being the wrong way round to how I imagined it to be with P1 upstream. The only one unaffected by this would have been Alec!

But when it was revealed that the swim Jack had was the one used by Mr Shipp for his Think Fishing video, it kind of eased the stinging.

The snag caused some verbosities but, unsurprisingly, Jack had done his homework and listened to most of the tutorial from Simon.

The result was a few belting Perch and a collection of Gudgeon which I know he won’t mind catching. One of the Perch went 1lb 12ozs which noses ahead in the specimen competition (at last!)

5lb 11ozs was far more than he needed to secure the win with the class that we all know he has. The win has kept the championship alive for Jack despite everything and even though his chances are slim at best, the best keep fighting until the end…

Congrats champ, good job…


We did it!

We finally got to the river, and I can die a happy man…

No, the fishing wasn’t as good as we’d hoped it might be. But, as I’ve been saying all along, this is the purest form of fishing. Natural water with wild fish. The juniors experienced the essence of fishing today and, despite some not having the blistering day that a commercial could have given them, I think everyone enjoyed the day. They all learned new skills, experienced methods outside of their comfort zones, and are better for it. The coaches and I very much enjoyed the day too and look forward to returning next year. If the weather allows it!


On behalf of myself, the coaches and all the juniors and parents, I wish to give our thanks to Simon Dennis who donated his time and energy towards giving our juniors the best start to their river fishing that we could have hoped for.

I know he was anxious that the river would be out of sorts because of the frosts on previous days, but a good coach wants his students to have the best day possible, and any worries were for the kids to do well and enjoy the experience. He said that as long as everyone catches, no one falls in, and we don’t get stuck in the field, he would be happy. I guess we’re going to have to be happy with one out of three!!!

I can tell him that they did all enjoy it and even those that didn’t catch hopefully will have gained something from the day.

Thank you also to landowner and farmer, John Hannam, for allowing us the access to the river. It is much appreciated.

Thanks also to Ian Paulley organising the day his end/dropping Simon in it from a great height and to Sturminster and Hinton Angling Association for allowing us, for the first time, to go interclub with one of our events.

Thank you, and I hope we can do this again next year, maybe a little earlier perhaps. Don't forget, you can fish this stretch of river and other waters on an exchange ticket obtained via Clubmate.


Thank you to our ever-faithful team of coaches, Jerry, Si, Chris, and Jon.


One more event then at Harbourbridge next weekend (23rd) before the end of season Christmas match.

If you have not yet booked into the Christmas match, the bookings close on the 19th, next Tuesday. You do need to have participated in a minimum of three events (including taster sessions) to be eligible.


My feet hurt.

My back hurts.

But we did the river, and I could not be happier…


Tight Lines,


Junior Sec…



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