Well, its been said by many a wise man that only a fool rests on his laurels, because as anyone knows, pride comes before a fall. I wouldn’t exactly say I have had a fall but my season up to this point has had a certain amount of “deferred success”. Either work has kept me off the bank side or I have been restricted with a closed mind to other options. Last season I did very well on fox mega-silk braid, this year I have already lost two good fish whilst using the stuff for hook lengths.
Two, is two too many as far as I am concerned and its continued use will now come under extreme scrutiny. It’s this scrutiny and searching for the best, which has had me buying different braids and fluorocarbons galore in search of the holy grail of hook length material.
Bait has also come under scrutiny, the gobstopper sized boilies which literally took the Trent apart last season for me have yet to really make their mark, but to be honest, the Trent has been starved of water for the majority of the season and has therefore been a totally different beast altogether from last year.
New baits
I have used literally millions of pellets as freebie offerings but apart from the ubiquitous soft hookers they have rarely made it on to the hook except in the match scenario. What a bloody waste! I should have been on them years ago.
Yes my gob-stopper boilies will catch; at times they will even out catch pellets during the day in clear water conditions. I remember Phil Smith sticking one on with a little look of amusement when he came onto the Trent in search of a double. He put two rods out, elipse pellets on one and a swim-stim gob stopper on the other. He had three barbel to well over 9lb and they all came out on the boilie. I was well chuffed that Phil, an angler of unbelievable experience and skill, an angler who I have looked up to all of my fishing life, caught his then Trent personal best on one of my boilies.
Yet, on the other hand there have been times when I am sure that I would have caught more if I had been fishing slightly finer and been a little bit “cuter” with my presentation. As they say there is more than one way to skin a cat and lobbing out a big chunk of paste, however good it is, isn’t always the best option. So I will be using more and more pellets as hook bait, especially during daylight hours and these will either be drilled or preferably super glued onto a modified hair rig seeing as I once pushed a pellet/nut drill through my thumb boring my way through a 21mm halibut pellet!
One of many barbel as a result of ‘ATD’
Dynamite baits have hit the mark again with their Frank Warwick range of boilies. I was lucky enough to get a load of 10mm given to me at the Barbel society conference and they have proven to be excellent baits. The very dark marine squid and octopus boilies look great over a bed of hemp and the spicy shrimp look well over a bed of mixed pellet and boilie crumb. I suppose you could say it is the sign of a sad individual with a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder that I check out what my baits look like in the margins before they go into action but it’s just another aspect of the important rule that separates a blank day from a catch. I call it the ATD rule, it stands for “Attention To Detail”.
This one rule will give you an edge 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. One major obsession that I have recently developed and is something I first noticed in the margin tests, (and it’s really starting to bother me a great deal) is the way the hook stands out like a sore thumb. Ok at full depth it will not glint and sparkle in the sun like it does in the margins but hooks and disguising them is something I have been looking at a lot.
Has anyone read much written by the likes of Smith, Horak, Miles or West? You should! You may find that you do not agree with everything they say but they are mental dynamos and reading through their books can act as a catalyst to your own fishing; sending your own personal train of thought down a completely new track or cause it to revisit old ones you thought were dead ends only to make new and exciting progress.
An 11 pounder for Lee!
I have started experimenting with jelly baits again, something I was doing ten years ago with limited success due to their habit of dissolving and melting but I seem to be onto a winner with a new bait that is freezer stable, doesn’t dissolve too quickly and was tested in the kitchen to high 80’s before it became too soft to use. The bait remains a secret at the moment but I have massive hopes for it on the Trent and Severn this year.
New rigs and re-jigs
Last seasons sensation for me was the fox mega-silk braid; it was lust at first sight! Its thin limp dull golden green filament had me transfixed in a thrall. I used it almost exclusively and boy did I catch! But I did lose one or two, not enough to get under my skin but this season the fishing has been a little harder and I have had to work hard for my runs. I have lost two very big fish whilst using it and although I still regard it highly the lust is wearing thin and performance related questions are starting to be asked about it, especially its resistance to abrasion.
So, with mega-silk braid doubts bouncing around my head, I decided to try some different hook lengths, namely monofilaments and fluorocarbons. Krystonite is the main line I use so I started using it as a hook length; like the pure fluorocarbons it is almost invisible but quite stiff. The braids are very limp but stand out like a sore thumb, so why not combine the two?
Combi-links are no new thing but they are usually not really what I am looking for in a hook length. What I want is the invisibility of the fluorocarbon to avoid spooking the prey, with as much extra poundage that I can get away with. I also want the trace to sit flush to the riverbed and it’s higher than water density ensures it gets right down onto the gravel.
The fluorocarbon also separates the bait from the feeder or lead because in clear water conditions, the barbel can if it wished, follow the braid straight back to the feeder as most stand out so much; but I don’t want to lose the bonus of the braids suppleness as the barbel moves over the final inch or two of the rig and snaffles the bait. I do not want the bait spitting out because of a stiff hook length. So fusion rigs it will be!
Now the actual joining of braid to fluorocarbon would seem to be straightforward, but to tell the truth I found it a complete nightmare. Some of the rigs I tested to destruction showed a horrific drop in strength, how could this be avoided? A few emails to Frothy soon had me armed with several alternative knots (thanks Dave) and also gave me the idea to incorporate a small swivel as a knotting point, this immediately stopped the problem with the braid slicing through the fluorocarbon and a small amount of tungsten putty changed the swivel into a small pebble.
Wotjafinkodatden?
That is the question I asked the Trent barbel recently. Armed with a whole new bag of tricks I decided that a fishing trip was needed to relax after doing a 15-day stint at work without a break. The weather forecast was shitty, with buckets full of rain imminently due anytime from late afternoon and into the night, not that the Trent wouldn’t benefit from the freshening up, it’s just I hate fishing in the rain, the only thing worse is fishing in the rain when it’s blowing a gale. So where to go?
Seeing as Matt Brown kindly sent me a picture of his new p/b barbel, a real goliath of a fish that has preyed on my mind so much I almost burned a dozen meals over the weekend, which then compounded itself into my dreams when on Tuesday morning there it was on page seven of the angling times, it’s only gone and won a Drennan weekly award!
I could say “lucky bugger” but that would be wrong, very wrong indeed! Matt has put a lot of work into that fish and he deserved it far more than I deserved most of my doubles! It’s fishing with and mixing with other like minded individuals like Matt Brown, Adam Roberts, Martin “The Mad” Womble and Ron “troversial” Clay that has catalyzed my carbelling and injected new impetus into something that was in dire need of a few new ideas.
Anyway I digress; the venue simply had to be Collingham, the spiritual home of barbel fishing from a bivvy! The twenty four pack of Stella was packed into my carryall beside my battery powered 42 inch flat screen television and satellite TV dish, gas powered fridge and an order was left with Tina to bring me another pack of Stella should I run out in mid communion (Veneration of the angling Gods is a very wet business for the throat!).On arrival I checked out the resident circus up towards the weir and decided on a pink candy floss and a bag of toffee pop-corn, NO seriously a lot of folk really don’t get the entire ethos of the session angler and bivvy boy, we are not the ruination of sport or the pale riders of the apocalypse and its only one or two bad apples give the rest of us a bad name.
I wanted to be fishing a crease swim on the inside of a bend and seeing as most everyone on the stretch were trying their hand at white water fishing or were right down the other end near the gravel barge conveyer belt, pegs were not at a premium and I was free to choose. Its times like this that I really can shine, empty banks, free hand at peg choice, nobody else’s bait to intercept the marauding shoals of ravenous barbel, nothing to interrupt my state of absolute tranquility. Bertie and co are going to get some proper tonk tonight and make no mistakes about that!
Peg choice is always a complex and detailed combination of experience, watercraft and natural guile; the barbel rolling and crashing at mid-river just made the picking of such peg slightly easier!
After setting up the bivvy with its fridge, flat screen television and satellite dish, then making my bed and turning back my real tree 6 tog summer duvet before quickly sinking six, pint cans of Stella Artois in pious veneration of the fishing gods, I set out my five rod matching set with colour coded delkims before downing another six cans of Stella in respect to the barbel god himself “barbelzibub” in hopes that he would smile kindly on me, the most humble of his flock. (Only joking!) I actually set up a pair of 2lb t/c carp rods matched with the excellent Maver sportera reels loaded with 10lb Krystonite.
The end rig was simplicity itself as the diagram shows, there’s not much room for rocket science in my style of fishing. I chose to fish one of my baits on to a straightforward fluorocarbon hook length, the other would be a combi-link of braid and fluorocarbon. The baits would be the new 10mm Dynamite baits fishmeal boilies soaked in neat irish whiskey, fished over a bed of mixed pellets. The boilies are made with the help and advice of the all time carp legend Frank Warwick, if they work for carp as well as they work for barbel no wonder the man is a legend. I thought Tezza’s source boilies were good but these are just as effective, if not more so!
The baits were fished into the boat channel, which was one third of the way across the river and bloody hell you get some boats on the tidal! The gravel barges such as the “Seagull” are bloody huge and the waves they create are pretty daunting. I wouldn’t want to be on the inside of their turn as that seems to be the bank that gets the biggest waves. No sooner had I put the second rod onto my trusty old fox microns did the first rod scream off.
The wash after a gravel barge goes past!
I lifted the rod and clamped down on the spool, nothing! No hook up, nothing! How could a screamer like that not have been a hook up? I still cannot work it out myself, but after reeling in checking it over and changing the bait it was back in and fishing nicely. The first fish was landed after about half an hour and was a spirited schoolie barbel of 4-5lb. Another one followed soon after and was as similar as a pod pea. The tide began to rise and that I thought was that because as the experts say, you don’t catch on a backing up tide.
Well the experts obviously didn’t tell the barbel and they continued to fall for the boilies, even when the river was stood virtually still. As the tide began to run off the bream arrived and had a little dabble before moving off and again being replaced by their “go faster” neighbours. A pair of eels came as darkness fell and I thought I was going to get “snaked out” but they were alone in their mini assault and I breathed a sigh of relief as I really didn’t fancy a big bag of bootlaces.
As the weather man predicted, the rain arrived and was persistent through pretty much all of the night rendering the bank lethal and covered in the biggest black slugs I have ever seen, in fact one of the slugs was so big I thought it was a bloody snake! As per usual, at a half past stupid o’clock, the down river rod slammed over and I was into a real grueller of a fish.
Its head refused to be lifted and as such it kept knocking the boulders and all the other fish losing debris on the riverbed. Very slowly and with several hairy moments when everything went solid as the feeder wedged between boulders, I began to make some progress and started to gain some line back. The clutch finally biting and wearing the fish out, the bronze flank of a very nice fish flashed in the light of my headlamp as it went on its final attempt at freedom. The attempt failed and as the fish turned it was met with the folds of my net, get in!
“a real grueller of a fish”
This was a very good fish and at first glance I put it at a good twelve but once a little closer it was apparent that it did not have the width and girth to quite match its length. The one thing that was plain to see was the Krystonite hook length was as rough as sand paper; I was lucky it had held. Much longer and I think it would have been a goner. The scales said 11lb 10oz and that, as they say, “Would do nicely”.
The rest of the night passed in the same vein with fish coming regularly, the rain was starting to get a bit depressing and so I called for emergency evacuation and was packed up and off the river a very happy barbel catching bunny for 8am, Job done!
Rigs
Here are the rigs I have started to use; they are straight forward enough and robust. The pellet rig is as a result of speaking/fishing with Matt Brown and taking on board new information and ideas (the disc of cork is purely optional and you may wish to simply superglue the pellets directly onto the hair) and so credit is given where credit is due, thanks Matt and the other barbel lads I have picked things up from and a special thanks to Frothy for the knots that keep my combi-rig from cutting up and falling to bits.
No cans of Stella Artois were killed or injured in the writing of this article; we also take no responsibility for any injuries sustained whilst using superglue, baiting needles or nut drills and all resemblance to actual fishing literature past or present is purely coincidental.
All the best
Lee
