The big river scene has many followers and sometimes these can meet, get on, and spawn their own little brigade of reprobates with their own new way of capturing their chosen quarry. This can lead to endless nights spent in the wilderness behind two, three, or even four rods sat on matching alarms, stinking of glug and hoping the next fish isn’t a carp, whilst slapping away the creepy crawlies, drinking enough Oxo to float the Queen Mary and eating the types of food that will see you in the grave quicker than .44 magnum bullet to the brain. If this sounds familiar, more than likely you are on your way to becoming a carbaholic!!
I first started with this style of fishing around six or seven years ago, for the barbel being reported in the papers were far in excess of what I was achieving even though at the time I was more than happy with my catch rate. I needed more doubles, doubles were what you were measured on, doubles were what I needed……..(Sad, I know). At that time a type of fierce jealousy fuelled my experimentation into altering how I was doing things and more importantly, when I did them. Magazines and papers were purchased on every angling subject, I was like a Baron Von Frankenstein character pawing through old text, gleaning information on whatever I thought was relevant to bigger barbel. Then it dawned on me as I read a guide on the cyprinid family; carp are simply fat barbel, barbel are the Linford Christie to their Gut Bucket. The seed was sown and the path was chosen. So what follows is not meant to be a bible guide of thou shalt not do this and thou must do the other, rather more a condensed guide to where I am now and how I got here over the last couple of years, with a short story of what happens when it all came together in just the right way. The start of the 2004 river season was for me one of the most eagerly awaited occurrences of my fishing life, never before had I managed to catch the types of fish I was landing in 2003. The closed season stopped me in full flourish, or so it felt at the time. As the weeks turned into months I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel, the long bleak closed season was drawing to an end and with that came the time to start planning and pondering new venues, rigs and baits. All I seemed to have done during the closed season was read fishing articles. I am not shy at taking advice from anyone and it’s surprising what jewels of information can be gleaned from one branch of the sport and used in another. Two things I have picked up from match style anglers is their vast expertise with baiting routines and novel ways of presenting a bait to fish that really have seen it all. So with all this new information taking up space in my not so capacious brain I was desperate to try some of it out and make a little bit of room in there for other vital issues like breathing, talking and not falling over when I walk.
The main differences between what I am doing now and what I have done in the past are the times I fish and the baits I use. Gone are the days when I would bang out a hemp and caster feeder and haul out a repetitive stream of fish in the 4-7lb category, not that there was anything wrong at all with that, it’s just that I had a hankering to prove to myself that I was capable of catching a bigger stamp of fish from the same venues that I already fished. So I set about changing my routines and preset ways of fishing the Trent. Yes I had been successful, but I wasn’t achieving the goals that I saw other angler’s attaining almost week in week out, it was time to change! The bait I use is homemade, which doesn’t mean that you will be stuck in the kitchen for hours on end as the whole process of making enough bait for a couple of sessions takes an hour or so, two at the most. Here is a list of what you will need to make a batch of paste that will last several sessions and can be stored frozen without problems. Lee’s paste mix You’ll need a large bowl, a wooden spoon, a saucepan and a tea towel
All that you do to this lot is throw it in a bowl and stir the dry ingredients together, then simply crack the eggs in one at a time, mixing them together until a smooth and elastic texture has been achieved. When the mix is ready spit it in half, save one part in its raw state and roll the other into whatever size baits you fancy, I go for a bait in the 20-40mm range. I then boil the baits for around fifteen to thirty seconds depending on their size and how hard I want them, removing them when I am satisfied and then allowing them to cool on a clean tea towel. Before sealing them in a bag and going fishing, it is that simple! The venue of choice Where do you go to catch big barbel? Well if you live in south Yorkshire or the east midlands then you would probably fish the river Trent. The river Trent, what an immense river that is, it makes the rivers of my home town of Sheffield look like tiny streams in comparison! Although the rivers Don and Rother are vastly improved and starting to get quite a good population of smallish barbel, I think it will be ten years or more before they start to produce any real monsters, and then they will probably not get that big, but then again, what do I know? They are for the most part Trent blood stock, I would guess transferred both legally and illegally by Sheffield barbel anglers fishing the Trent as well as the Environment Agency, both in an attempt to redress the mess we have made of our local rivers in the not so distant past. The Trent Where do you start? It has barbel from top to toe but I tend to fish the upper to middle reaches, concentrating most of my energy around the Nottingham area. I like to fish a river before it gets that deceptively placid, lower reach look and the good thing with the Nottingham area, every swim has the potential to produce a fish. Quite a few swims have the potential to produce a lot of fish and a small number regularly throw up a monster or two every season. Stories of sixteen and seventeen pound fish regularly do the grapevine where I fish, but how many of these can be relied on is another thing. The carp anglers who catch them have a habit of guessing the weight of anything other than their ‘own species’ and yet that leads to the main part of big barbel fishing today, the change in tactics, with the move away from the old faithful baits like casters and luncheon meat and onto high nutritional value baits, ie boilies, pellets and pastes. Fishing large baits like these can be a culture shock to some, as the hookbait is regularly bigger than a meatball, and I have caught on baits the size of a small tennis ball!
The session of the Solstice I opened my Trent account of 2004 with two overnight sessions, both around Nottingham and within a couple of miles of each other. This is the journal from the first session, the second being a whole different story and one to be related at a later date. It was summer Solstice and the river was spot on except for a tad of suspended weed. The water felt bathtub warm and was up a few inches and holding the faintest hint of colour. The rain we had experienced the week previous only just making its presence known. On arriving at the peg I had chosen I wasn’t too surprised to find it empty as England were playing some cheese making mountain dwellers who’s referees don’t understand the vagaries of the beautiful game (sorry, I digress, I am still a little bitter!) which left what to me looked like a mile or so of prime river as my personal playground for the night. Happy as could be I unloaded the trolley and set about tackling up. Tackle The tackle I use on the Trent is a bit more powerful than the norm, with the rods being a one and three quarter pounds and two and a half pound test curve Shimano Powerloops and Beastmasters, the latter rod having its maiden outing since its arrival from Improve your Coarse Fishing magazine during the closed season. The rods are matched with big Baitrunners and these are loaded with 10lb mainline which is the new Krystonite. Onto the line is threaded a Breakaway clip with a 2oz homemade feeder, the hooklength is 12lb braid, my choices being the Suffix and Fox ranges, depending on what I want them to do. That night I had the very limp Fox Megasilk on as I want a very supple effect and the colour matches the bottom nicely. Hooks are size 4, B982s tied with knotless knots. The only thing different about my knots is that they are all loop and quite short, the reasons being I cant cope with tiny loops at three in the morning when its cold and wet and my fingers are all thumbs, also they are short so that the bait sits flush to the shank of the hook which improves the hook-up ratio of any chub that come along. The rods are fished up in the air onto a reliable old pair of Fox Micron alarms which have done themselves proud over the years and must have heralded the arrival of quite a few thousand pounds weight of specimen fish to the bankside with their somewhat less than dulcet tones.
Straight away I was confident of landing a few fish, having seen a couple roll and heard several splash down onto the pacy surface while tackling up and my back was turned. The feeders would be loaded with a mix of hemp, several sizes and colours of Swim-Stim pellets and a little marine pellet groundbait to stop the pungent combination getting too claggy. I do tend to use a lot of Dynamite Baits products for my fishing as I find them first rate and they suit my rather aggressive methods of fishing. Once the boilies were given their coating of paste, which resulted in a bait about the size of a golf ball, the feeders were given a gentle lob onto a very definite crease line just this side of the main flow of the current, maybe three rod’s length out. One of the most common mistakes I see on the Trent is the preoccupation some anglers have with the far bank, but ask yourself this, would you fish under the rod tip all the time? There isn’t a lot of difference, so before you send your feeders bombing into the rat holes on the far bank, look at the water and try and build a mental picture of what is going on down below. Invariably the fish will be holding where they will get the most reward (food) for the least amount of energy expended, as the majority of food will be taken with the current. It’s only sensible to be within striking distance of it but not actually in it as that would use too much energy, there are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part it serves me well; I don’t get beaten off the next peg, or blank very often.
Full of excitement I stood between the two rods as they gently nodded with the current, waiting with bated breath for my first hit of the 2004 season. The wait was very short indeed because within two minutes a bronzed torpedo was trying to shatter my new rod as it slammed it over with unbelievable malice. There was no little tappety-tapping or calling card knocks, the golf ball sized boilie and paste bait obviously too attractive to warrant good table manners. The battle that followed was everything a good scrap should be, the slightly more sporting 1 3/4lb Beastmaster allowing the fish some chance to show what a big river barbel is capable of, with long surging runs and sudden changes in direction…. pure adrenaline! The perfect argument for the cessation of the stillwater barbel stocking programme, such power should not be held in the overcrowded, low oxygen environment of a commercial pool. It is, in my opinion, like running a formula one car around a go-cart track! As the fish slowly began to tire I had a pretty good idea that it would be a good fish but on netting it I was stunned when I saw what I knew was a double-figure fish, what a way to start the season and what a way to christen a rod! Oh yes, much Stella Artois would be laid upon the alter of the fishing gods! the fish was quickly placed into a sling and the Avons spun around to a very respectable 10lb 4oz Celebrations were cut short as the other rod gave a sudden jolt before it too screamed off and that really was to set the pattern of the whole session: land a fish, hook another fish, play the fish, weigh it, hook another, lose one then hook two more. Absolutely manic with both chub and barbel in a post spawning feeding spree! Everything was having to be done at speed with fish after fish after fish cueing up for the baits, the golf ball sized lumps sending out irresistible signals that were driving the fish into a frenzy. Still chuffed with the double it was soon to be joined by another, then another even better fish of 10lb 10oz, a totally spawned-out long fish which was as wide as my thigh across the shoulders but as thin as a starving whippet in the belly. Had I caught that fish in March I reckon it would have been a twelve. By first light, as the mist rolled across the surface of the river and the early rays of the sun lit the morning with a fiery red glow, I stood in the Trent up to my waist playing what was to be my fourth double-figure barbel of the session and I thought of Ron clay, and how he must have felt when he landed his quartet of monsters, knackered, absolutely shattered but also elated and bursting with a sense of true achievement. So there I was standing up to my guts in water, covered in sludge and bits of weed cradling another Trent animal and I thought about the colonel in ‘Apocalypse Now’ standing amongst a scene of absolute carnage. Laughing to myself like an escaped lunatic I said with a smile “I love the smell of Swim-Stim in a morning!” its absolute Dynamite, never mind napalm and it had blown this section of river to smithereens, taking absolutely no prisoners whatsoever!
I had had one of the best nights fishing anyone could have asked for with a final total of 29 barbel and 13 chub over a period of around 11-12 hours which is a fish every 16 minutes or so. The barbel were topped by fish of 10lb, 10lb 2oz, 10lb 4oz and 10lb 10oz, the chub were for the most part in the 2-3lb range but I did have three real dogs of 5lb, 5lb 2oz and 6lb 1oz (my first six for a few years). The final tally must have passed the 200lb mark easily and if the boilies hadn’t started to run out later in the session forcing me to cut them into two I am sure I would have had a couple more fish. The quality of the baits and the way they are fished I am sure contributed to the success of the night and as someone who was always unconvinced of oversized baits I must urge anyone who either wants to catch their first barbel or increase the size of the fish they are currently catching to give them a go, you have nothing to lose but a night’s sleep! Coming soon, Part Two – ‘Tackle and Techniques in Depth’ |
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