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1995-2000, Approaching the Millenium

1995-2005, The First Ten Years - The Beginning

2000-Present, The Millennium and Beyond

A Fish Called Mavis - Dave Johnson

A Floppy Hatter at Pewsham – Jon Berry

A GOOD INTERIOR DECORATOR

A Very Special Barbel

Anything two can do, one can do better - Fred Crouch

At the water's edge: 20th January 2011

BARBEL BY THE ABBEY

Barbel Handling Code

Barbel School

Barbel School 2012

Barbel Society statement; River predators

Barbel Society supports river improvement

Barbel Society, Research and Conservation projects

Barbel stocking, Barbel Society and EA reach agreement

Barbel’s eye View - Martin Ford

Blueprint for Water

Centrepins and using them.

Christmas - Will Golightly

Close Season Petition

Cormorants – Biodiversity in Danger

Damaged Membership letter

Day on the Frome

Days Out With The Juniors

DRAGGED TO THE TRENT (KICKING and SCREAMING) - Paul Owens

EXCITEMENT, ANTICIPATION, HEARTACHE AND JOY

Friday The 13th - Adrian Kiddell

GOVERNMENT REJECTS CANOEISTS’ CALL FOR STATUTORY RIGHT OF ACCESS TO RIVERS AND STREAMS

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Just Cause And Impediment

Membership Year 2009-2010 Special offer

My region does nothing for me! - Harry Green

NFA has adopted BS Handling Code

Pin Perfect - Gordon Scott

Press Release

Removing The Errors

It all began for me down on the Wensum when I decided I only wanted to fish for barbel. I’d been through the bream scene, the tench, the zander, the pike and all that, but barbel were my first love and that was when I started to observe these fish at close range in clear water for hours.

One of the things I learned very quickly was that when I made a mistake of some sort, the fish departed from the swim. I set about eliminating these errors so that I would be in a far stronger position to put a bait in front of an unstressed fish. I began watching their behaviour at close quarters in an attempt to understand them and read their body language.

So lets take an imaginary situation on a river such as the Bristol Avon, Teme, Kennet Stour or the Hampshire Avon, anywhere that you have visual contact with the fish.

Swim selection and feeding

I’m not a great lover of what you would consider the classic barbel swim, I much prefer nondescript bits of water where many anglers wouldn’t dream of fishing. The classic barbel swim would be the four foot gravel run with the overhanging willow tree on the far bank, shelving up to some shallows and so on. If anybody has just joined the syndicate on the Pewsham stretch, they will know that it is full of ‘classic’ barbel swims and I would venture to suggest that 95 per cent of them don’t contain any fish at all. Yet a non descript little contour change in the bank under a small scrubby bit of willow may have fish that live there all the time. I don’t overlook the classic spots though, if there are fish there to be caught, I set about catching them.

So lets pick a hypothetical piece of river. What would I be looking for? Obviously I want to find some fish. The first thing I would be looking for would be a source of flow, some nicely broken, oxygenated water would be my starting point. The bait dropper is a very important piece of my kit, because it enables me to put bait accurately into tight little spots. So my first course of action would be, having found a source of flow, to put half a bait dropper of whatever particle I was using as an attractor i.e. hemp, party blend, trout pellets sweetcorn, or whatever, onto all the little bits of clean gravel, provided and this is the most important thing, they are adjacent to a barbel holding area. I will not feed areas where I cannot get a visual contact as the only way to find out if fish are there is to fish, and that is time consuming. This is not the pre-bait to catch them; this is the pre-bait to find them. Most important is a little bit of bait in a lot of places, and observation. As you see a group of fish move onto the bait you can then make a choice of whether you are going to fish for this group or not.

There is no point putting half a bait dropper of attractor bait into a foot of water, half way down a long stretch of six-inch deep water. They are not going to come up through that, so there must be some cover of some sort. Cover can consist of a large bed of ranunculus, a depth change, or undercut bank. A very common swim on the Bristol Avon is the undercut bank. I’ve seen as many as 10 or 12 barbel in a space of about two meters all tucked under some overhanging grass, the cavern of that undercut probably goes back 3 or 4 feet and that would be an absolutely perfect swim.

I have found that fish will respond to this first introduction of bait in less than two minutes. They will not necessarily start to eat on that first visit, but they will show. I will bait numerous swims in this fashion over a section of river, then return to each one and observe the results. If over two or three hundred yards of bank I find two or three groups of fish I shall then set out an action plan as to how to catch certain individuals within those groups.

Having located fish the first thing I look for is where they have come from. So I will study the contours on the bank, the depth changes and so on. What I want to locate is where I think they are stationed, that is not where I want to fish for them, because they will go back there to recover from my attentions. Their recovery time in their normal station will be much quicker so therefore they will respond to the bait and come again to where ever I am trying to catch them. This is a common fault, people try to fish for them where they actually find them, whereas if the fish have demonstrated that they are prepared to move to your pre-bait we can take them wherever we want. So I take them to the most advantageous place for me to present a bait.

I’m now thinking of a stretch of the Kennet for the purpose of this article. There is an overhanging willow tree on the far bank, four foot of nicely paced water flowing underneath it, lots of shade, lots of cover a natural habitat for barbel to live in. Most people attacking that swim would pre-bait with three bait droppers about three or four metres above the tree, allow that to settle for maybe twenty minutes and then fish over it with a static lead and a lump of luncheon meat on the hook. This is not a criticism of the approach I am just saying that we can do so much more.

Simply because you have cast over to the far bank you have already created yourself a problem, by the introduction of the terminal tackle. So how do we get over this? It’s quite simple, if you believe and understand that the barbel will come wherever you put the bait provided you don’t frighten them.

So lets examine this particular swim again and change the approach to the presentation of the pre-bait. I would put half a bait dropper three or four metres above the bush, and another three or four metres above that, but in mid river, so we are drawing the fish from the bush across the river. I would then put another bait dropper one rod length or less out on the nearside, so we have baited a line of approximately 45 degrees.

Trust me, it works. If your pre-bait contents are capable of activating the fish from underneath the bush and fetching them four metres up in a straight line to start feeding they will come another four metres across to the middle of the river and another four metres to the nearside. So that’s where I would attempt to catch this particular group of fish, not across the far side close to the tree. I now have close observation of the group to pick out the biggest one, but more importantly to exactly position my hook bait in the right place. Most importantly, I can introduce the terminal tackle with no spook factor involved such as the lead hitting the water. I would suggest to people reading this that if they took the approach that I’m talking about they will get four or five fish from that particular swim as opposed to their normal one to two, but it takes a bit longer!

For arguments sake, let us say that a group of six or eight fish has moved up to the first meager half dropper of bait and within very few minutes they have eaten the contents. They will quickly be on the hunt for more food and will soon find your second offering. Then, before very long, they will come to your ‘attack zone’. Here I will have introduced three droppers full of hemp, partyblend with a few trout pellets and meat or paste mixed in.

The next important observation to make is the route the fish take into your attack zone. There are numerous ‘fish roads’ for want of a better expression that are followed by food searching fish. One of these roads will lead to your attack zone. I do not want to catch fish at the precise point where they enter the swim, although I will put a bit of loose feed there, I would target them two or three metres farther up.

When your group of fish enter the swim for the first time they will probably come in quite fast, swimming about a foot off the bottom. A lot of people commit the cardinal sin at this point and introduce the terminal tackle. Goodnight nurse, you’ve now added a spook factor that could see your fish depart and not return again that day.

Steady yourself, watch those fish for 15 to 20 minutes at least, and then decide when and where you are going to catch them. Having entered your swim, the fish will make the decision as to which way they feel safest when entering and leaving to return to their resting place. I will be taking in this information all the time.

Body language

A barbel’s behaviour and my interpretation of their behaviour will tell me what my next course of action will be. If the barbel come into the swim with their tails moving very positively and swimming in an absolute straight line up to the bait I know that they are very secure and quite happy. If they come into the swim very slowly off the bottom and turn around two or three times before making positive progress up the swim they are not sure. So something is not quite right with the situation, and this is where introduction of the terminal tackle now will probably spook these fish, so hold fire.

Now let us assume that the fish have made their decisions and are happy to return and feed. The first back will probably be ‘shoalies’, fish in the four to seven pound region. These will come up through the loose feed, side by side, mopping up food particles as they go. They will then be followed by the bigger fish. As they get to the top of the baited area the fish will lift of the bottom and drift back down to their exit/entry point. If there is a large group of barbel I may have to top up the swim with another dropper of bait, but this is only ever done when the fish have left, I never put a dropper into a swim with fish in it as this is bound to scare them.

If you can reach this point, resist the temptation to fish for them for another 10 or 15 minutes, this will give them a chance to settle and begin feeding in earnest, each competing for their share of the food. If they become competitive I can introduce my terminal tackle with confidence that I will get a ‘pick up’ within about thirty seconds!

That’s all well and good if you are happy to catch the first fish to find your bait, but me, well I want to catch the biggest member of the shoal, so I will take the process a stage farther.

The Subtleties

It has been said that barbel are thick, which is generally true, but some of them have made a move up the intelligence ladder and these are the real challenges. I recall feeding a swim in the manner that I’ve just described. A group of fish from four to nine pounds was behaving exactly as I expected, but a fish in excess of eleven pounds entered the swim from the bottom then drifted back after it’s initial recce. What followed was a real surprise for me, the fish then re-entered the swim from the top! That fish had swum up the far bank, five or six metres above the prebaited area then swam right across the feed in a downstream direction. I have no doubt that this fish was looking for line in the water, if I’d put a bait in the water at that point it would have seen or felt the line and been spooked. I know that it had been caught before; in fact I had it myself at 11 ¼ lbs a few weeks previous.

So, given these circumstances, how do we pick off the best fish in the shoal? I begin by adding a couple more bait droppers of feed a further two metres above the existing feed. Now stand back and wait a while, the smaller fish will move up on it, possibly followed by the big one, but you have now created a bigger area to work in.

The big fish will enter the swim and may go to the top area of feed, it may not, but what it will do is leave the swim after each visit only to return some thirty seconds or so later. Now I have the trap set, I can wait for it to vacate the swim then place a bait in the centre of the ‘road’ that it is using to come back and forth. When that fish returns the chances are that it will take my bait. If a smaller fish approaches the bait, I’ll tweak it with a slight pull on the line, just a small movement is usually enough to put the fish off your bait without spooking it too seriously. Simple; this whole process would have taken me about an hour and a half from start to finish, yet I suppose that 90% of anglers would have put a bait in the swim much earlier and although they may have caught a fish, they would have failed to get a chance at the largest fish in the group.

If when it comes back it refuses my bait then I will have to consider the terminal tackle, as a feeding fish would not pass over an item of food unless it was suspicious. My first option would be to ‘back lead’ or maybe use the reed method (hiding the mainline in a piece of reed)

This then is my approach and how I eliminate the enforced errors. To sum up these are some of the most common errors to avoid.

I don’t worry about hiding from the fish; I will stand on the bank in full view dressed in drab or camouflage clothing. Barbel don’t spook as easily as chub, so as long as you stand still and most important of all, don’t stamp or shuffle your feet, the fish will not even know you are there.

If you can, backwind your lead into the swim, or overcast then draw it back and lower it into the right spot. Leads hitting the water will spook fish every time! I once watched a group of barbel feeding on the Wensum, I put a single swan shot on the line above my hook bait and cast some ten metres above them intending to work the bait down to them. As soon as that single shot hit the water, every barbel vacated the swim! So if you badly cast a bait dropper or an ounce lead right on top of them you can guess what will happen, and your bait will be in a barbel free swim,

The last point to make is this, I have described a situation where I can see the riverbed and the fish, as that is how I prefer to fish for barbel. But if you cannot see the fish on your river you must remember that they are behaving in exactly the same way and will spook at all the same mistakes, the only difference is you didn’t see them go.

Trefor West

Research and Conservation

Research and Conservation Auction

Research and Conservation projects

Research and Conservation Report

Research and Conservation Report - Feb 2009

Research and Conservation Report - Update

Research and Conservation Report May 2008

Research and Conservation Report, January 2008

Research and Conservation Report, July 07

Research and Conservation update, November 2008

Rivercall Service from The Environment Agency

Rivers revealed: the best and worst in England and Wales