The Lure of England’s Greatest RiverI had decided that I was going to spend some time at the back end of the season trying to break my barbel PB of 13lb 7oz, a fish which although a real whacker at the time is now in need of being usurped at the top of my PB list.
I really fancied a 14lb fish or if I was lucky maybe even a 15lb fish, but… I failed. My god though, did I fail in the most glorious of fashions! I will try my very best to put into words what I was thinking and how I went about sending the Trent barbel wild! A difficult season to say the leastLet’s be honest, the season we have just had has been a difficult one to say the least; we have had the worst floods in my memory, along with the resulting fish displacement and year class losses and swim remodelling. Some stretches I fish look totally different. Floods aside though, I never really got to grips with the river this season and so I decided that I needed to think about what I was going to do rather than turn up and ‘chuck it and chance it’. That would have been a recipe for disaster! Water temperatures, moon phases and tide tables are not usually things that I pay much attention to, but in order to be successful I was paying attention to everything! The water temperature was looking to be gloriously high as I approached the final week, that is, until we had a ridiculously cold snap that sent it plummeting through the floor (along with my confidence) but it did rally and in the end it was a respectable 7.5 degrees C and steady when I arrived at the venue. The temperature was probably the only minor positive that I could take though, as the river was flowing with all the turgidity of a triple filtered mountain spring that was destined to be bottled, irradiated and stacked on the shelves of Marks and Spencer’s waiting to be sold to some gullible fool with more cash than sense! On the banks of the TrentSo, It’s the last few days of the season and I am on the banks of the River Trent with a weather forecast that is saying the winds will be reaching extreme gale force by late evening, which is pretty much par for the course as far as this season has been concerned. I had already decided on my plan of attack before I arrived at the water’s edge and I quickly assembled all the items that I needed to carry out my mission. TackleThe rods would be Fox Extremis 2.75lb test curve, capable of throwing the necessary 8oz of lead attached to the feeders to ensure that they held station solidly at mid river or even beyond. The rods would be matched with Fox Stratos 7000 series reels loaded with 12lb Kryston Snyde, an excellent and robust line!
Why do I choose such large leads? Quite simple really – I do not want my leads to budge once they hit the deck. If they do I will be in a snag faster than Amy Winehouse chasing Lewis Hamilton’s car when she heard he had a ‘crack in his pipes’. The planOnce the leads hit the deck they mark my line of attack. Every cast after the first has to be within that ‘line’. The ‘line’ has to be nailed in place as that is what the fish will follow as they come up the flavour trail and once I had chosen my swim and studied the flow I decided that my line would be at about 40-45 meters out. The reason being is that line marked the edge of the deepest water and also where the current straightened out and began to channel into one long run down the section. One long run which the barbel would be able to follow like a trail of crumbs right up to my bait. That was the plan anyway; it made sense to me! Bait, and the theory behind my choiceSo what would I use to tempt the barbel out of their slumber and onto the feed? I would use nothing more than a handful of Teme Severn micro pellets, some Barbel Stick and Method Mix, plus the real killers in the blend, corn steep liquor and a bottle of activator mix. And a whole lot of it! Way more than is recommended! WAY MORE!
I hold great faith in CSL because it is an instant attractor that leaks away very quickly and in so doing creates a long flavour trail that the fish can follow. The best way I can describe my theory would be if you could imagine being in a large warehouse. At the top of the warehouse is a small table with a fan on it (that is the current of the river) blowing over a freshly baked loaf of crusty bread and some newly fried smoked bacon (that is my CSL soaked stick and method mix). It smells delicious. Six feet further down the warehouse is another table, this one is a tiny table that has a single bacon sandwich sat on a small china plate (this small table is my hooklength and hook bait). Eventually the hungry fat bloke wakes up and smells the bread and the bacon and goes looking for it… He is hungry, he is fat and he is greedy. He follows the smell. The smell is faint at first but as he moves up the warehouse it gets stronger and more enticing…. until the smell is making his stomach growl with hunger! Just as he gets to the bacon and the fresh loaf of bread he knocks his knee (Barbules) on the smaller table. What is this? He asks himself, but because he is greedy before that thought has even passed through a dozen synapses the wee little sandwich is half way on its journey to his stomach. And it’s all over Beethoven! Ah, but CSL just attracts bream I hear you say! Good! Even better!
Have you ever seen the pharyngeal teeth on a bream? They are awesome things designed to crunch crustacea down into putty. Sound travels far faster through water so instead of having just smells travelling down the warehouse we now have the noise of a couple of lazy slobs eating a family sized pack of Doritos on top of the amazing aromas. And that will drive the fat bloke wild! Not only have the crunching noises woke him up but most importantly he doesn’t like sharing his food with anyone. Now he is rushing blindly up the scent trail and he is getting really careless! That’s the theory of it anyways. Some may pick holes out of it but it works for me. Rod PositionThe rods needed to be carefully placed as to reduce the chances of them being blown off the alarms. So I positioned them at a very sharp angle and tried to get the rods actually pointing at the bait, the wind was therefore pushing right at their backs rather than across and whipping them off the alarms. Unfortunately the wind also meant that I had to have my bivvy facing away from the water’s edge and because of the forecasted spring tides, further away than I would have wanted in an ideal world. But Fox Microns are a loud little alarm and I was confident that even if I had been under the influence of a full array of substances from ketamine to Californian batty crack ganja weed they would have woken me up. But being a barbel specialist type of session angler and not the carp variety my clean living ways would ensure that I stayed alert! RigsThe rigs I employed were simple running affairs with extra long tails made up of about 5 foot of fluorocarbon. Being daytime I chose a breaking strain of 8lb, well it says 8lb on the sticker but seeing as these are 300 meter mother spools and not 20 meter retail spools you can never be quite sure. Finally this would be finished off with size 12 Drennan Super Specialist hook baited with four red maggots that had been glugged with Teme Severn Lamprey flavour. The amazing thing about this glug is that the lampreys that went into making it smelt just like smoky bacon frazzles!
There is nothing worse than employing the services of a glug that renders the angler a social pariah! I have used some stuff in the past, especially the crab, cheese and squid flavoured glugs that left me smelling like an unwashed rent boy that plied his trade from the waste fish quay at Grimsby docks! I smelt so rancid that you would have thought I was decomposing! Anyway, less of that and more of thisA good punt had the feeders going out to the halfway mark of the river at an angle of about 45 degrees down river. The feeders touched down with a thump and did not move. Perfect! I get my feeder leads and watch leads from Paul Fisk of F.F.F who makes and supplies the best leads on the market barring none! I buy them in bulk whenever I see him and usually they last me a season because it is an unlucky angler that casts straight into a snag, and a stupid angler that rolls his way into one! And these babies don’t roll! Adam Roberts, another of the DVSG lads, even goes so far as to cable tie two 8oz watch leads together when the river goes mental. The rods sat well in the alarms and pretty much ignored the wind that was by now getting quite brisk! I tidied my peg as the sun was now over half way and well on the drop and the last thing a session angler needs on his first overnighter for what feels like an age is a trip or fall that could end up with him taking a three week swim down the Trent and getting washed up on some Lincolnshire beach after being picked at by seagulls. That would definitely be a closed casket affair! Bloody hell, I am digressing a lot. Let’s have less of the cadaverous and more of the piscatorial for crying out loud! The winter of discontent was over!The upriver rod knocked and then slammed over. Fish on! Whoo-hooooo! The winter of discontent was over! I was in contact with a fish and I have never felt such relief!
It’s always a great feeling when you get your first bite of a session even if it was from a very small chub that would have been struggling to go much over a pound. The size was irrelevant though; my rigs were working and the plan would bear fruit, of this I was now sure! I was ecstatic! Soon after the chub came a bream that looked for all the world to be a ‘silver’ bream as it slipped over the net, but closer inspection revealed it to be nothing more exciting than a 2lb skimmer that had chosen not to change from silver to bronze just yet. That’s something that is quite common in the Trent as I have had fish to well over 5lb that are very pale and silvery in comparison to other bream of a similar size from different waters. The sun hung over the horizon and began its final decent. The light was beginning to fade away quickly and I must admit to being absolutely on edge. I knew my plan would work – I simply knew it! A change of rig and a MedusaAs the night fell I changed rigs over from fluorocarbon to coated braid…They were still longish affairs of about 4 feet but in the darkness I felt that the fluoro had lost its advantage and I would be better served employing the higher breaking strain of the coated braid should any leviathans be awakening to the smell of smoky bacon wafting down river. A Korda maggot clip was hair-rigged onto a size 6 Drennan and on the clip were impaled at least 20 red and white maggots; a real medusa’s head of a bait! The feeder mix was given a fresh shzushzing with another good dollop of CSL as it was becoming a little bit too light and would wash away. I wanted it to at least reach the deck before it wafted away down river. The moon rose and was barely a slither; it was going to be a very dark night indeed. Spring tides…slithery moon…Steady temperatures…It all looked to be going in my favour. The omens were good! Fish on!The baits hadn’t been out more than an hour when the downriver rod began to buck and the Micron squeal. I carefully put down my Pot Noodle and said to my fishing buddy Martin, “I think I may have a fish on there!” Matt said I said, “For ****’s sake look at that **** Go! That ******* will be in ******* Gainsborough if I don’t stop it!” I cannot really recall much after that except a very dogged fight that was accentuated by the extra heavy lead. Everything feels like a double when you are carrying 8oz of church roofing on your gutter mesh! The fish slipped over the net and the scales said that it was a tad over 8lbs. I wouldn’t have been happier even if I had broken the British record. Like I said, it’s been a long hard winter and this was my first barbel of 2008. The account was now open and waiting for more deposits! |
Welcome!Log into your account
