10 Things We Love About Going From Summer Into Autumn

01 Autumn photos
Golden leaves, misty dawns and dewy spiders’ webs make for the perfect distraction from blanking. And when you do catch, you can always find a colourful backdrop in autumn. If it’s not raining. 

02 Back to school
Obviously, kids are the future of our sport, but their summer holidays—during which parents also take time off—are the busiest on the banks, so arriving at a day-ticket lake in the middle of the week to find it quiet can have the same soothing effect as leaving your kids with their grandparents for a weekend!

03 Longer feeding spells
You can’t read or watch anything about winter carping without seeing the phrase ‘windows of opportunity’, and the same can be said in those oppressively hot days of summer, but in autumn it at least feels like there’s a chance of a bite at any time of the day.

04 An end to sweating
There’s a glorious sweet spot in autumn where the temperatures are comfortable during the day and night, and you can banish all memory of waking up inside a sweltering summer bivvy sweating like a Lee Evans stage show. 

05 New jacket 
There wouldn’t be a buoyant angling clothes market if people didn’t buy them, so don’t pretend that autumn isn’t the absolutely perfect time to don your newest Big Jacket and stylish hoodie to casually show off down the lake. 

06 Wanging in bait
We all know bait’s expensive and it probably holds us back from really piling it in at times. But come autumn your partner will be eyeing up that freezer space and you’ll be filled with a sudden urge to throw caution to the wind and lob it all in for that ‘autumn feed-up’ you keep hearing about.

07 Last chance before next spring
As with using up all this year’s bait in a big hit, some autumn sessions can really feel like your last proper time on the bank before a long winter of pretending to like perch or posting endless TBTs on Instagram. It can be a melancholy time, but it also focuses your mind to give it one last push before the frosts.

08 The promise of less weed
Oh, summer’s turned into autumn, that must mean the weed will have died back to reveal amazing new clear spots. Every year we seem to kid ourselves about this magical underwater foliage clearance, and every year we get frustrated that it takes far longer to happen. But it’s a nice thought, at least.

09 Under cover of dark
More hours of darkness means less light for the diving birds to spot your bait and, on some waters, the potential for more consistent action. Be that on your rods or some slightly more dubious action during down-time in your bivvy… 

10 Sport on the radio
There’s something pleasingly old-school about listening to sports commentary on the radio while fishing, and, as summer fades into autumn, big rugby and football matches return. Well, they ‘return’ in the sense that there was probably a week without football this year sometime in mid-July.