The river Kennet is fishing well this month, I still haven’t caught any barbel other than by float fishing. I so love this method and never use anything else. Many people have caught bigger fish than I have by legering with halibut pellets. Les Weller had a huge seventeen pound fish from a local river using them but I seem to have lost the desire to catch one big fish after waiting biteless for hours. I much prefer to stand in the water and trot a float, totally engrossed in my presentation and feeding and catching other fish as well as barbel. I have had several days this month when besides a few barbel I have caught twenty or thirty pounds of roach and dace too. Some of the dace have weighed ten ounces and that’s on six or eight pound hook length. What size could I catch if I scaled down to size twenty hook and a pound hook length?
Let me explain my barbel float fishing tackle. [Note: some of the following information has been published in two articles I wrote for last year.]
Barbel are a hard fighting fish and live in fast flowing water, they will test your tackle to its limits and there is no credit in playing them to a standstill in warm water with little oxygen or getting broken off and leaving hooks in an exhausted fish. The fish is the most important item in this equation, when barbel fight they give everything and they build up a lot of lactic acid in their muscles. Even on sensible tackle you will have to nurse the fish before release,so if you aren’t prepared to use strong enough tackle to land the fish quickly then leave them alone!
You will need a powerful rod that is flexible enough to delicately control float tackle when trotting, some carp waggler rods will do at a push but I have found them too stiff in the tip for fighting a fish a close range with small hooks. I prefer two rods made by Harrison - one is the three piece interceptor float rod at twelve feet nine inches and the second is a more powerful rod by the same manufacturer, again three piece and called the stepped up, stepped up float rod. No that’s not a typo, there really are two”stepped ups” in the name. The former I use with a hook length of six and a half pounds, the latter with hook lengths up to ten pounds.
These breaking strains may seem excessive but barbel in the Kennet have got bigger and now average six or seven pounds. Add to this the fact that since the disappearance of the streamer weed they now inhabit the snags much more, and whilst careful loose feeding may lure them twenty or thirty feet from their lairs, when hooked you know where they are going. An eight pound fighting fit barbel going down stream in a fast current takes some stopping in twenty feet, four pound line and a match rod won’t do it, trust me (and I used to be a policeman).
I will talk about lines and reels next month.
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