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Our friend Juan Carlos finaly managed to take his best pen and wrote for our delight a little story on his favorite fish: Chub!
” If there was only one fish to keep on fishing that would be the Chub. Honestly, I love Chub, he’s the best sparing partner ever! The best fish to catch on fly. FIrst of all it’s a beautiful fish, all in shiny silver with it’s big scales. For me, a fish has to start with nice silvery scales, he’s wearing a shiny armour like the knights from my childhood toys. Of course if you get a closer look, you will see thousands of glares and shades on that armour. This range of colours and shades is the one that is able to see the poetic soul, this peciluar vision that allows you to see things diferently. I like Chub because it’s a fish you can find everywhere, it’s a mondane fish, it’s a generous fish, it’s a popular fish.
Unlike trout and salmon, it’s not endangered, you can find lots of it in many rivers, so you can only focuse on large specimen (over 20′ or even 40′ in some places). It’s the perfect fish for lines #4 or #5, it’s a suspicious partner and most of the time, hard to catch. Think about it: a 20 inches chub is an old and wise fish, (it needs 3 years to reach 15 inches). But it’s a very opportunistic fish, you can catch it with all kind of things: small nymph, big mayfly, streamer, foam ant, hopper, minnow… What I like is to catch chub on sight, and since this fish likes the surface the most, you can even fish on sight on tainted waters, which allows you to be able to fish almost in any conditions. Ho, I can already hear some of you laughing and looking down on me. I do’nt care. If the Chub is despised it is mainly from a snobish attitude. “Historicaly” fishermen despised Chub because not only his flesh is tasteless but also it has so many bones, you cannot eat it. Even poachers won’t kill itaor try to fill up a freezer with it… To my eyes this is yet another quality of this fish! Nowadays, it’s catch is much less prestigious than a big trout, this being a reason why we don’t have as many as big torouts as we had… But I’m not like a fistfull of those “Happy few” who live by wild rivers filled with trouts or graylings, and I don’t beleive that a chub is less hard to catch or to fight than a trout in the same conditions. On the other hand, it’s much more available, you can fish it during the heat wave or the frost. And one of the other assets of that fish is that he shares his waters with numerous other species, and as you’re fishing for chub you can get the chance to cathc perche, barbel, pike, you can try to nymph on Rudd, Tench or even Carp, it’s a generous fish and a sharer. 
This might also be the only criticism I would have towards it, it’s fly fishing season, even if it is longer than the trout and salmon’s one, has to stop in winter (around my home anyway). Then I feel left out, desolated, abandoned, the only cure to this boredome is to pack my bags for warmer waters and pay a visit to the Chub’s tropical cousin, the Bonefish. Like him filled with bones, and despised untill a few american sportsmen discovered it was so “fu on the fly”… Ok, it’s tropical cousin will empty your reel more often then a Chub, but that’s only a detail.
Juan Carlos
