Sometimes I think that anglers should be born with webbed feet (apologies to any readers that were), it has been so wet this month that my beloved river Kennet has been in the fields and most of the Wasing Estate has been inaccessible due to flooded tracks.

My thanks go to John Butler, the head bailiff on the estate, who had to winch my car out of a very muddy track last week due to a failure of my four wheel drive (more about this in a later post

).

I have managed one day barbel fishing since Christmas but my choice of swims was limited by access problems. I ended up in the car park swim above Brimpton bridge with the intention of field testing one of my two new flood rods. I found a pair of two pound test curve Harrison Torrix rods on Ebay and couldn’t resist them, they were less than half the price of new rods and were in mint condition.

I fished one in conjunction with a Relum centrepin (very similar to the Arnold Kingpin and the old Swallow centrepin). I have had this reel for about ten years but have hardly used it because it has been loaded with eighteen pound mono for carp margin snag fishing and the gap between the drum and the back plate discourages the use of light line. With the Kennet in flood I knew I would need to cast a lot of weight so I went to my reel drawer only to find that the line on the Relum was well past it’s sell by date. I replaced the line with a bonded braid made by Spider wire called Ultracast in thirty pound breaking strain, I dislike using ordinary braid on a centrepin because the coarseness of the braid makes Wallace casting difficult and this braid has a smooth coating.

I fully expect some criticism over the use of such a heavy main line but in my mind it was justified due to the strength of the current and the debris that was being washed down, the hook link was a soft twelve pound braid. There is no credit in leaving fish tethered to a bunch of weed and other debris because your end tackle became so heavy during the fight that the main line couldn’t take the strain.

I fished a large open-ended swim feeder weighing six ounces loaded with fishmeal ground bait and mixed pellets with a fifteen millimetre crab flavoured pellet on the hook. These pellets are really strong smelling and just the job for really coloured water. I managed to get the rig to hold the bottom in a small slack on the far bank by holding the rod up high to keep as much line out of the water as possible.

Martin James was fishing up in the weir pool, he came down for a visit and by some amazing coincidence he too was using a Relum centrepin (the only other one I have ever seen), which he praised highly. He had caught one barbel just short of ten pounds from the weir pool and we had quite a long chat.

I tried several other sizes of flavoured marine pellets without success and eventually switched to a ten millimetre Dynamite Source boilie, hair rigged to a size ten hook. This produce a couple of tentative taps and finally in mid afternoon a barbel of just over five pounds (small baits in flood water, haven’t they read the books?). Dusk produced one more bite but the hook hold failed.

The rest of the month has been devoted to tackle repairs and replacements ready for the spring coaching sessions which are programmed to start half way through February. I did start a day’s chub fishing on the river Embourne (a tributary of the river Kennet) but it was spoilt by getting the car stuck and ended fishless.

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