A Barbel in May....

I'm not sure how many Barbel are in the pool but an escapee from the Avon when it was in flood ? who knows. I may have caught it before a few years ago and on the same method too. It fell to my sleeper rod with luncheon meat as bait. Although I didn't weigh it, it looked around 5.5 / 6lb

It was a frustrating day otherwise. I must have emptied the lake of it's small Perch, I had hundreds of the buggers on my float, maggot and centrepin set-up.

I was the first angler to arrive at the pool, when I left at midday it was the busiest I have ever seen it, the other anglers were not fairing that well either.

The following day I went for a morning at Snitterfield Reservoir, I don't usually fish it during the day, in the summer, of an evening I prefer fishing in the margins on the shelf for couple of hours of  or surface fishing baits for the carp.

I had some maggots and worms left over though so the plan was to fish them on the float and also fish a sleeper rod with sbs corn boilies. I've found when the fish are moving fish a rod length out, shallow, maybe 3 or 4 foot and feed maggots, loads of them and you will get the fish feeding. You will get stupidly fast bites and these are from small roach, ignore them because you will inevitably miss them but wait for the float to properly dragged under.

Within 5 minutes of the sleeper rod settling the baitrunner screamed off and I was playing a fish, it's always interesting what you will catch at Snitterfield as it has some fantastic quality fish, could be a big roach, a specimen crucian carp or one of the resident carp. It turned out to be a small Tench of a 1lb or so, and in the bright sunlight there isn't a better looking fish.

I only stayed for a few hours but the float never settled, lots of topping fish enjoying the sunshine and if I hadn't have run out of maggots and I had my keepnet with me I'd have started to bag a new full. The bigger fish were bream around the 1lb mark and I also caught a few crucians. The bigger crucians are being caught according to Twig the balliff and as the days are getting longer I'm going to try a few evenings to try and catch one of the specimens.