Day on the chew

I had a spare morning so I thought it would be nice to go and try and catch a grayling , as the last one I had was when I was 14 and that was on the river chew at woollard, so today I was back on the same river but a bit further down at Compton dando where bathampton have the rights to two fields on the right hand bank upstream, as with woollard I hadn't fished this stretch since I was at school and apart from being very overgrown it was pretty much the same . This was proper travel light fishing, a rod a reel with 3lb line on a few shot and a couple of 3AA loafers plus some 18 hooks on ,14 line , half a pint of red maggots and a landing net.
I walked to the top of the second field planning to fish my way back to the bridge in any swim I could poke a 12 foot rod into, something shorter would have been better but I don't posses one , the river was a nice colour with a proper flow so I was hopeful , but after fishing my way through half the field I was getting a bit despondent, all I could catch was minnows and a few minnow sized micro trout, next swim was about 100 mtrs above a footbridge just round a bend , so I repeated what I had done previously , so I just sat on the bank flicking a few maggots into the flow, after 5 mins I dropped the float in , it went about 6 feet and buried, like it had done fifty times before, I expected another snag or a minnow , but this kicked back, and I was soon looking at a nice little grayling in the net of about 10oz, job done . Next run through I had another of about the same size but further down the swim, these cousins of the trout certainly are pretty fish and fight surprisingly well for there size. I stuck witht he swim for another 20 mins and had a dace of about 4oz and a 8oz brownie, I fished a few swims back to the bridge but had no more grayling, in fact I had very little of anything apart from a nice dace that may have gone 8oz, well it was bigger than 6oz !!!.
Apart from the top of the second field I couldn't even catch minnows, it seemed as though the river just switched off, but I wasn't complaining as I succeeded in catching what I wanted ,and it was nice to run a float down a nice bit of flow, something I haven't done in a long time, I may try it again before the river season shuts.