Wednesday, 18 July 2012

It's Getting Tougher...


Well the honeymoon period is over, the barbel (and chub and carp) have wised-up to us fishermen. They've spread out and are thinking twice about the baits they are offered. Even the broken weather, which barbel like, isn't helping much. It's going to be tough going from here...

Tuesday: Evening and night session trying to tempt a barbel on sweetcorn, but only a 2lb 9oz chub and a little barbel about 12oz were tempted and that was well after dark.

Monday: Fishing with Darren and we stayed into the night, just one barbel to Darren, a cracking 9lber, but that was just before midnight.

Friday: Couple of hours fishing SB4, for just one eel. I did lose a couple of bigger fish through hook pulls - they weren't feeding confidently.

Thursday: Couple of hours in the pouring rain with Dan, our first blank of the season!

Time to go searching for the new haunts, experimenting with times of day, rigs, bait and working a lot harder for the fish - something I enjoy!

Last year we had a tough end of July but in August and September we were back on them, I've been looking up where we found them and what they were feeding on - the advantage of keeping extensive notes.

And we've had a great start to this year's barbel challenge: 100lb down... 200lb to go...


A very welcome little chub, 2lb 9oz


About 12oz, I love photographing mini barbel - hopefully one day someone will be proudly holding this fish up for a photo when it's a double.

4 comments:

  1. good write up on this. Can't agree more about the extensive notes for further review. Hope they pay off and August treats you well. Stumbled across your blog and now following.

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    1. The spot where Darren caught on Monday had fish this time last year, but only for a week. So gradually building up a picture of barbel movement, a few more seasons of notes will help.

      Thanks for the follow, been following yours for about a year now - good stuff!

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  2. Tell me about it, not seen a Barbel in 2 weeks now...

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    1. This time last year they went off the boil for a couple of weeks... Hopefully they'll be back on it soon!

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