With my fishing non-existent towards the back end of last year, while I was looking after my poorly girlfriend, I’m pleased to report that with the onset of the New Year her condition improved and I finally had the opportunity to get the rods out and do some angling.
The first chance I had to get out was for an afternoon and evening, and with mild weather and recent heavy rain things looks to be ideally suited for a barbel trip. Once I was at the river it looked just as good as I’d hoped, with plenty of colored water pushing through and, although I don’t do a great deal of barbel fishing nowadays, I was glad that I’d chosen barbel as my target species on this occasion.
My chosen stretch has plenty of feature and therefore picking a swim can be difficult, the difficulties have been exacerbated by other factors too. With the entire Great Ouse catchment heavily populated with otters, which has led to a drastic reduction in barbel stocks as the population has been devastated over the last few years, the bits of river with a few remaining barbel can therefore become quite busy with barbel anglers whenever the conditions are favorable. With this in mind I like to get to the river as early as possible and pick a swim that I’d be happy to stay in all evening in case a number of other anglers decide to target the stretch and the opportunities to move between swims becomes limited.
The swim I eventually picked had a number of attractive features, including a good depth of steady-paced water and some nearby cover which always provides the fish with an added sense of security whatever the water conditions. There was perhaps room for two rods, but I often feel more comfortable concentrating on just the one, especially when there’s a decent amount of extra water and the amount of debris and suchlike that might be coming down in the flow is difficult to determine.
Dynamite Source boilies are my ‘go to’ barbel bait in these conditions. To help boost the attraction I was also planning to nick a small PVA mesh bag of halved and quartered boilies onto the hook, and to wrap some previously prepared paste made out of powdered Source boilies mixed up with Dynamite’s Premium CSL Liquid around the hook bait on each cast. The hook bait itself was two 10mm source boilies on the hair, which is a presentation I tend to favor over the more standard single larger boilie.
As I was preparing everything for my first cast I discovered that once the frozen paste had started to thaw out it was obvious that I’d mixed it to dry and the paste was tending to crumble rather than be easily molded around the hookbait. I still wanted to make use of the additional attraction of the CSL liquid in my crumbly paste, so I swapped the PVA mesh bag of boilie bits for solid PVA and added some of the crumbled up paste to the boilie bits and constructed a slightly larger solid bag.
If I wanted to I could fish until reasonably late into the evening and I didn’t want to spook any barbel that might be in the swim by being tempted to fish too early and before they were in a proper feeding mood. So, with this in mind, I managed to ‘sit on my hands’ and delay the first cast until the light was just starting to fade. That first cast was made a couple of yards upstream of what I considered to be the real hotspot in the swim, as I was saving a cast into the prime spot until it was fully dark.
Almost following the script that I’d planned in my imagination, the first cast didn’t produce a bite, but about an hour or so later, a short while after a second cast right to the area of the swim that I considered to be the most likely for a bite, the rod top slammed round in typical barbel style and the fight was on!
I find that most big barbel are ‘plodders’ rather than fish that tear around the swim at high speed and I was pleased to discover that this one felt ‘weighty’ and was keeping the rod well bent, but it didn’t appear to be tempted to go for any dramatic long runs or show much interest in the potential snags on either side of the river.
Eventually the fish allowed itself to be guided into the landing net and I could tell even before having a close look that I’d caught myself a ‘whacker’! She registered 15lb 14oz on the scales and I was immensely pleased with my first specimen barbel for a few years.
I’ll be back here very soon with an in-depth look at my method of zig rig fishing and after that hopefully I’ll have some more fish catches to tell you about in my next diary piece.
Until then… happy fishing!
