Warwickshire Avon - Breadonomics and Buffoonery

There are few things in angling quite as satisfying or quite as nerve-racking as watching a great slab of floating crust drift lazily towards a summer chub that has already spotted you before you've even spotted it. Clear water has a habit of making an angler feel like he's wearing a fluorescent jacket and tap shoes, while the chub sits beneath an overhanging bush looking as suspicious as a home office inspector at a cash-only car wash in Coventry.Chub have earned their reputation for caution over generations of surviving everything that rivers, predators and anglers can throw at them. Every shadow, every misplaced footstep and every badly aimed cast is carefully logged in that thick skull of theirs before they make the unanimous committee decision to disappear in a puff of silt.Yet for all their apparent paranoia, chub possess one wonderfully exploitable weakness: greed. They can spend five minutes inspecting a crust with the concentration of an art critic before suddenly deciding…