The river level info on the Environment Agency website has recently been moved to the catchily named River and sea levels for England website.

The good news is that the info is easier to read and mobile friendly!

I've been putting it to good use over the last couple of months to get an idea of the stretches of the Rive Avon I've been fishing over at Keynsham. There's two that are handy:

Latest river level information for: the River Avon at Keynsham RL
This is the Jack Whites stretch below the weir running in front of the old Cadbury chocolate factory.

Latest river level information for: the River Avon at Keynsham US
This is for the Crane stretch above the weir heading towards Swinford.

There's also information on the River Levels site:

River Avon at Keynsham RL

River Avon at Keynsham US

Although the data is the same, it's displayed slightly differently and has some nice additions like maps and graphs.

I arrived around 6ish which gave me a couple of hours on the bank. Unfortunately for me, there were no fish to be had but the sunrise was absolutely stunning!

Having stripped my gear down to the bare minimum I think there maybe room for the DSLR in the kit bag now so the next trip out will be a combined fishing and photography session ;)

The fish counter at my local Tesco here in Bristol had done me proud bait wise: I'd picked up mackerel, sardines and a great looking herring.

As it turns out, the herring got me a fish on the bank!

My 1st two sessions out on the River Avon (My 1st Session On The River Avon And My 1st River Pike! and A Pre Christmas Pike Session On The Bristol Avon) went incredibly well, with multiple pike being caught (and lost) and my Dad also bagging up on silvers and a monster perch.

But the last three sessions have resulted in a frustrating mix of finicky bites and not a single fish gracing the bank. It's been so slow that I've only recorded one video...

I've been giving a great deal of thought to the recent change in luck. The first thing is that the weather has been very unseasonable recently, with mild days and a lot of rain. So much rain that on the 2nd blank session out, the river had flooded most of the previous swims we'd fished and the flow was so fast that finding any areas of slack was virtually impossible...

In the video above, I managed to hook and loose a small jack pike but went to on to be plagued with nips and pulls on the line. This has also happened on the 2nd and 3rd trips and based on the amount of eels my Dad pulled out during the flood session, I've a feeling that these slimy snakes maybe the cause of all the missed bites rather than pike...

Having given the water a week or so to subside, I decided to take my daughter Lilly-Grace out this Sunday just gone for a 3 hour afternoon session. There was a feeling of pike in the air with a hard frost on the Saturday and no rain forecast (although it did end up drizzling all morning...).

But despite moving swims every 20 minutes, covering a lot of water and investigating every snaggy, pikey looking stretch of water, the best we could muster was a string of bites on one rod which again I'm going to put down to the dreaded eels...

We also bumped into 4 other anglers all of which hadn't had any interest all day!

So something is up! I'm resisting going down the route of changing bait, tactics etc. etc. as I know what I've used in the past has worked and I'm reluctant to over complicate it (a common mistake in carp fishing...).

So we've decided to give the river fishing a break for a week or so and the next session will be up at Lower Kilcott Farm to bag up on energetic carp and silvers on the method and float rod. I need a bend in the rod and if you can't catch at Kilcott, it's time to take up knitting!

But be warned River Avon Pike, I will be back...

It's half term week which has meant I'm on kid duty for 99% of the time but when a two hour window presented itself I couldn't resist the opportunity to wet a line. The Holiday Inn Lake was the obvious choice as I was dropping people off at Bristol Parkway station and then picking up from UWE and with a good winter form, I was really hopeful it would produce a fish on two.

The weather was all over the place, sunny one minute followed by heavy rain the next and I was greeted at the lake by two soggy looking match anglers who were in the process of leaving. They were shaking their heads and saying it was fishing hard... But I wasn't to be put off! Prior knowledge is so useful and I put mine to good use, dropping in on peg 25 and quickly getting both rods out using the tactics that have done me so well on previous sessions: a yellow dumbbell wafter on a helicopter rig and a feeder filled with liquidised bread and a double sweetcorn hookbait. Both rods were fished as close as I dared to the died back lily pads and I sat back to see what would happen.

It didn't take long before I started to get liners and after 20 minutes the helicopter rod ripped off with a plump common of around 6lb. The feeder rod took a couple of more casts but finally the tip swung round and another smaller common graced the bank. As an extra bonus, I also snagged up on a cage feeder rig that'd snapped off during a session a couple of weeks back and managed to get it back in! Great to have it back in the tackle bag rather than in the lake.

The swim went dead after that and despite a couple of further moves to other productive swims I couldn't raise another bite. But I was pretty chuffed to have caught so quickly on such a short session!