Big River Trent barbel - mission accomplished

Although I had made a conscious decision to do more barbel fishing on the river Trent this season circumstances had until recently limited the time that I had available to devote to that plan. Although on paper the Level Two Angling Coach course takes up six classroom days over four weekends there is also the need to spend some considerable amount of time at home and on the bank carrying out practice sessions and planning. In theory I could have got away with spending less time on this but as the course went on I found myself revising my ideas constantly and in effect I went over the same ground a number of times which in hindsight was the right thing to do and is actually a fundamental part of the principles of coaching. The upshot of this is that I didn't really get stuck into a fishing campaign over the summer months. Short barbel sessions fitted in well but the Trent fish are much more cooperative after dark and short summer nights meant a lack of sleep which was too much for me to handle on a regular basis. A few outings for other species have broken up my time but effectively I've been down to one, or at the most two, sessions of only a few hours per week for a good while and that wasn't helped by me catching shingles, it never rains does it! The start of October saw me complete my course and it was time to snap out of the doldrums and get stuck in to some fishing proper once again, with the nights now drawing in fast it was prime time to get back to the Trent.

Chub bolt rigs and other ramblings

Well I am now well behind with the blog for several reasons. After that amazing piking trip to Chew I was in limbo angling wise to some extent due to a few commitements and the fact that we were shortly off on holiday to Gambia. A brief opportunity came to fit in a session just before the holiday and I decided to have a crack at the Derwent chub.

For several years I have been considering the bolt rigging for chub situation. I've read plenty that tells me that it is viable though I've never really been completely happy with the method and when I have tried it on a few occaisions I have sat back and watched the rod tops knocking, shortly after each knock I can't help but think that if I was holding a quiver tip rod then I would have been playing a chub by now. Discussions with other anglers that have spent more time using the method that myself seemed to confirm my thoughts, it is an inefficient method but under some circumstances it becomes the best route to go down due to the prevailing circumstances. By prevailing conditions what I really mean is difficult fishing, low populations of chub which require longer sessions and possibly multiple rod use, it is accepted that some bites will not result in a fish being hooked but in the long run it is thought to offer better odds. It is still a difficult concept for me to take in but I do find it very interesting and it is something I wanted to investigate further so this session was going to be all out bolt rig style. I had bought a packet of circle hooks for just this purpose some time ago on the reccomendation of Bob Hornegold and so they were dug out of the tackle room along with some boilies and a bit of method mix and I was ready to go.

I didn't get to the Derwent till half an hour or so before dark but that wasn't a problem particularly as I fully expected after dark to be the prime time for a bite or two. The stretch does throw up a fair few 6lb plus chub but I've never really felt that I've cracked the place. I've had a number of chub over the last three or four years but only a couple over 5lb's and one of those was while perch fishing. I can't honestly say that I can walk on to the fishery and guarantee catching a fish, it certainly isn't heavily populated with chub. I knew where I wanted to try and so was soon in position. One rod was to be placed a rod length or so from the near margin in deep water for the river, possibly eight feet at a guess, the other rod would be swung out towards mid river in a bit more flow. Both rods had a gripper lead attached to a leadclip and a short braided hooklink with the strange looking circle hooks fitted hanging below. A 16mm boilie whittled down a bit was to be the hookbait and a wad of method mix with some pellet of various sizes added was moulded around the lead. I had no doubts that any fish present would know that the bait was there but the question was would they feed, and more to the point if they did would the rig do the business?

Despite fishing self hooking rigs I had fitted istotopes to the rod tops to show and interference with the rigs that didn't result in a hooked fish. Of course with a fixed lead the only way that an indication would be seen was if the lead was actually moved and so it was more than likely that I still wouldn't see the full picture but it might give some idea of aborted pick ups and was the best that I could do in that respect without using a running lead which I didn't want to do. Light rain soon started to fall prompting me to dig the brolly out and make myself cosy, the plan was to stop as late as possible aided by a couple of cans of caffeine loaded potion and to stay put in the one swim so I may as well be comfortable.

I lounged back, transfixed on the fireflies on the end of the carbons as the evening went on, there were no signs of knocks or twitches which I took to be  good thing though a more substantial indication would have been more than welcome and eventually it arrived. The close in rod just walloped straight over without warning and the alarm indicated a short run, that was what I wanted to see and gave some confidence in the method at least though one fish does not of course make a season.

4lb 13

That was my only fish, and indeed the only indication that I was aware of, all evening. I did have another visitor to the swim a bit later on though in the shape of an otter, the first absolutely definite sighting that I have made. To be honest even though I know full well that I have been amongst the creatuires for some years it still came as a bit of a shock to actually have one in front of me. It travelled downstream through my swim before making its way into a snag tree on the far bank where it seemed to stay for a few minutes, all of the time making a strange kind of rasping call before disappearing. Well I didn't really know what to do with myself after that, my confidence suddenly plunged and I felt a bit lost with all sorts of thoughts going through my mind. Within half an hour I'd decided to go home and by 11pm I was sitting on the sofa with beer in hand contemplating the effect that these otters will have on our future angling.

So a few days later we left Birmingham airport to it's -3 degrees of frost and flew off to the Gambia. This was a new destination to us, my favourite winter holiday destination is Goa but when the Indian government decided to virtually double the visa fee just as we were about to book I looked elsewhere. The six hours of flight time to Gambia versus ten odd to India plus the fact that there was no time difference from the UK was a great tempter. And then I remembered seeing John Wilson visiting the country on one of his shows. In the end and despite Lewis Baldwin giving me some great information on the fishing opportunities out there I decided to make it a fish free week and spend the holiday with 'er indoors, after all I do get away with quite a bit at home so I thought I should be fair for once. Besides, the sea was rough as hell...!

We did have a great week though and I was glad that I made the decision to take my decent camera with me as the bird life out there is incredible, for anyone interested in that kind of thing I would highly reccomend a visit.

I got home to find this cracking mug waiting for me, I won it in a competition on Facebook and it is now my new favourite, stunning artwork by Chris Turnbull.

A company called Printbiz supplies them along with some other species designs which I can see ending up in the cupboard soon

Barbel forays and more commercial perch

On Sunday I conceded and spent the four hours that I suddenly found that I had free barbelling on the River Soar. The temperature was well up and the river was just about within it's banks, so I was told, plus I couldn't think of anything else to do at short notice so I went for it. Pulling up at the road side I looked across towards the river beyond the lake that the field had become and it looked like I could make it to the bank, Once I'd got within twenty yards of the lake I started to have my doubts but I found a fairly narrow crossing point that just about failed to swamp my boots at full tip toe.

Just about within its banks

 Starting at the top of the stretch I worked my way through a swim an hour most of which required five ounces of lead to hold steady, but of the whiskered ones there was not a sign. What I did see though were some tracks running along the bank in the freshly deposited silt. It would be very unusual for a dog to be in the area and I suspected that it was an otter which I confirmed when I compared them to some pictures on the internet. Sightings are now being reported on a very regular basis on most of the stretches of river, only time will tell what impact they will have.

It looked the part

The far bank snags looked a bit iffy!

The warm spell continued into the week inspired I was not but eventually the need to fish persuaded me to visit another commercial fishery to try for a perch or two. This particular fishery had been kind to me in the past and in fact was where I had caught my biggest stripey to date at 3lb 11oz's several years previously on a day which had given me another three captures in excess of 3lb's, I say captures and not perch as one of them visited me twice in the space of half an hour or so.

Was this fella still there?

I arrived at dawn to find the place empty which was not unexpected to be honest seeing as it was midweek after a holiday. My mate Rob would be joining me later but until then I had solitude which was some compensation seeing that the water isn't what I would call scenic, more functional in the normal fashion of this type of fishery. I started off on the windward bank and float fished a prawn down the edge in four feet of water over a bed of chopped prawn and maggot. After an hour and a half I got wander lust and wound in to have a look at a swim in the opposite corner that covered the largest reedbed on the water, it certainly looked good. As I was debating the move Rob pulled up behind me and after five minutes of chatting I had convinced myself that it was the place to be, Rob was going to drop in further along the bank towards where I had started.

Once I had got myself reorganised and had plumbed the depth in my new swim I started to feed a pinch of maggots every few minutes along the reed lined margin while I set up another rod with a live bait rig. Within twenty minutes I had the odd fish boiling sub surface, this was starting to look good. I decided to give it half an hour on the prawn before trying to catch some bait but that didn't produce any positive bites so it was time to get the maggot on. Straight away it was a bite a chuck, a couple of micro perch first, then a 6oz roach that I returned as being a bit big for what I wanted, then a small carp of some description, possibly one of those F1 hybrid type things, it certainly didn't look quite like a true carp anyway. The bites kept coming but very few were from my perfect bait sized fish. Eventually I had three small roach in the net and gave up at that, I stuck a prawn back on the float rig after I had swung out the paternostered roach on the other rod.

This time the prawn was getting more attention, mostly nibbles from small fish but I had two more small carp and a bream of about 2lb's, no sign of the decent perch at all. A shout from down the bank told me that Rob was getting a similiar result, he'd just been given the run around by a carp of 3 or 4lb's. I gave the lure's a go for an hour before dusk and thought I felt one possible hit but it could have just been debris. The method was very productive on the water previously and I was starting to think that maybe there was no longer a head of larger perch present. I don't plan to return any time soon to try and find out to be honest, it was a days fishing and it was nice to get a few bites in these hard times but I do find many of these commercials to be soulless places especially in the depths of winter.

I needed to get back on the rivers, levels were almost back to normal on the Soar and with the weather being incredibly warm for the season I decided on another barbel trip. The stretch that I had in mind had been difficult to get to for quite a while due to the floods and I wasn't certain that I would be able to park in the usual area, there is a layby that can be used but memories of broken windows from years gone by puts me off of that one if at all possible. I drove slowly across the first field avoiding the main ruts and it was looking good, then I saw a very soggy looking patch of grass ahead and no way was I going to risk that so I swung the motor off into the rough grass and carried on towards the second field. Within a hundred yards I could see that I wasn't going to make it and decided to park where I was and carry on by foot, the field was a mass of mud made worse by a heavy vehicle of some sort that had been through making walking tricky and driving suicidal.

As I suspected the banks hadn't seen much traffic since the flood had receded and as I also suspected the going was tough, it was slippery as hell and great clods of mud stuck to my boots making every step hard work. I started off in my old faithful spot which was looking in great condition with the floods having pushed away a lot of debris while also scouring away the river bed to create what will be an excellent sight fishing spot next summer. if we get a summer that is.

Thoughts of summer stalking came to mind

Two rigs went out complete with pva sticks of small pellets and crumbed boilie, a spicy tuna boilie being on each hair. After an hour or so the downstream rod banged over a couple of times, no doubt due to a chub attack, but other that that it seemed strangely dead. I stuck it out for three hours which is much longer than I would normally stop in a swim on the Soar but I was confident that barbel weren't far off, eventually though I knew that I had to move.

I walked another three hundred yards downstream to an area that I've never caught a barbel from which is a strange choice maybe but I know that they do turn up there at times and the more I blank the more I want to catch one from the spot. Again I only made one cast per rod and just with a small pva stick for a bit of extra attraction, despite it looking good for a bite the last swim had proved that the barbel weren't ready to crawl up the bank so there was no point in going over the top on the bait front. I sat down and surveyed the huge amount of debris deposited in every bush and tree by the high water, almost entirely plastic of some description and the vast majority of it will still be there for months to come. Even if the rubbish does get dislodged the problem will only be elsewhere, many plastics take an eternity to degrade and even if they do so they release toxic elements into the environment. It's a sobering thought to consider that we have only relatively recently been producing these materials, what kind of state will we be in another few hundred years?

Rubbish,  that just about summed the day up

I was shaken out of my thoughts by a swirl mid river and twenty yards downstream that caught my eye. I stood looking directly at the spot and suddenly there was another swirl that developed into a bow wave that travelled for a few yards before disapearing, then two more big swirls heading into the near bank. That didn't look like any kind of fish to me, the nature of the bank stopped me from seeing any further along the bank and no other activity was seen, was it another sign of an otter? Whatever it was it was the most excitement that occured all day, it seemed so right but it obviously wasn't.

On the way back to the van I stopped to check the permits of two anglers piking. They too had struggled with only one jack between them when they would normally expect more, it's a funny old game this fishing lark. Talking about it later someone remarked that the day in general had seemed strange with hardly any bird life about and when I came to think of it he was right. No matter what we think we know there will always be a lot that we don't understand, it makes things so much more interesting, and frustrating.

Linch Hill - Willow pool, roach heaven

Wednesday the 7^th to Friday the 9^th of March

I arrived back at Willow at 3pm on Wednesday afternoon and with the swim I fished last week free it would have been very rude not to have taken advantage, to be honest from what I saw on my last session the fish are now very active and I've seen them across quite a broad area of the lake but I know this spot well, the rods were still clipped up and they were out fishing within no time at all. A mate had picked me up one of the new mini spombs earlier in the week and I used that to put five loads of maggots out over the rods, in well over ten feet of water they would have spread nicely and given a different effect to just using the feeders. When I fist saw them advertised I imagined that they wouldn't be quite as small as they are and I was very pleasantly surprised, what an excellent bit of kit for my style of fishing, I can see that getting used a lot this year its absolutely perfect for baiting over the tench rods amongst other things.

With dusk approaching fast I got the cooker fired up for another boil in the bag curry, I'm not sure how widely available these meals are but I picked them up in Asda a few weeks ago and they are the business if you like a bit of authentic Indian grub, in fact they are made in Mumbai!. They come in a box containing a foil packet, five minutes at a good boil and your ready to go and the foil keeps it warm for a good while so you can knock up a feast, biryani ready and waiting while the paneer in sauce was cooking. The water had crept up to the boil but the gas was obviously running low and I was just considering changing it when the right hand rod started to do its thing and I was into a fish. Just as it was approaching the net but still a touch feisty the middle rod absolutely screamed off, I'd seen that the one I was playing wasn't huge and quickly bundled it into the net before picking up the other rod. This fish started fighting a bit further out and I was starting to suss out that the rudd seem to fight more than the roach in general which rang true this time and after a protracted, splashy, fight under the rod I scooped the big carp net under a bar of gold bullion shining up at me in the torch light. I secured that net on a bankstick and quickly recast both rods before dealing with number one, a rudd of 1lb 8oz which I slipped back. The second fish was something else, at 2lb 12oz's it broke my pb of last week by an ounce and truly was the most incredible looking thing, I'm not sure that pictures will do it justice.

The pan certainly wasn't looking any nearer to boiling properly so I turned it off and switched gas canisters before firing it up, it was just hitting the right temperature when I was jumping up to bend into another screamer of a take. The fish came in easily before starting to plod about on the marginal shelf and then rolling in the torch beam showing that it was a big lump of a roach, in the net she went and this was something special, it almost seems silly to say that, I've had a week of somethings special. A perfectly formed roach as fat as butter lay on the mat, slipping her into the sling I knew that it was well over 3lb's and the scales made it 6oz's over, mindblowing stuff indeed, two pb's in the space of half an hour or so, I was quite simply blown away, I just didn't know what to do with myself.

I'd turned the stove off while I dealt with the pictures and it was just back up to the boil when I was into another rudd, again of about 1lb 8oz's, followed by his twin not long after, I finally got to eat sometime shortly before 9pm when the action stopped. With my nine days of enforced abstinence now thankfully over I sat back in my chair and cracked open a much needed beer, absolute nectar! The night air was cooling fast and the unhooking mat was covered in a sheen of glitter, the stars shone brightly and a great big moon smiled down as I reflected on what had just happened, it was just too much to comprehend, my mind tumbled with a million thoughts, almost too much to bear.

Thursday morning started with sunshine and became a glorious day with only the odd wisp of thin cloud in sight, the birds were singing and Thomo was a happy man. Going on the results so far I was not really expecting action during daylight hours but I carried on working the feeders and thought that perhaps I should cook a bit earlier that evening. It really was a lovely day to just lounge about next to the water I had no complaints at all about being left in peace by the fish, I read a bit, listened to the radio and just kicked back.

Mike Townsend arrived mid afternoon and after a natter went round to my right to set up for the night. The carp had been active all day and I had heard some commotion in the far corner which I thought was more carp until Mike shouted over that it was an otter, in broad daylight obviously with no fear of us whatsoever, where will it end?

Just as dusk's curtain fell I was into a lively fish and as I predicted another rudd, in general the roach have fought much less energetically, another "pea in the pod" job at a pound and a half, a lovely fish nevertheless but the past weeks events had made it look tiny. I sat behind the rods with great expectations but it just didn't happen, that was the last indication I had, the odd fish rolled in front of me but not in the numbers that I had heard on previous nights.

Five am saw me packing away ready for the long drag up the motorway, Mike had blanked through the night too and was moving around to my bank to try his luck, I wished him the best of luck and was on my way. By seven thirty I was ninety miles away making a brew in the kitchen and by nine I was at work, a tough routine but the only way that I could string two nights together, as it turned out the second night didn't pay off but it could just as easily have turned out differently.