‘Once bitten, twice shy' boll*cks

I'm not having a good time at the minute; I need to take the blinkers off because as a new stretch of the Avon I have been fishing hasn’t been too good to me. I’m a bit fed up of catching Chub, and I’m surprised I’ve said that. Yesterday evening seemed perfect conditions, after the recent rain the river was in fine fettle; a couple of foot up since I last fished it, a decent pace to it and coloured.

As I had the stretch to myself I decided to alternate between a couple of swims, the first was a nice slack area just off the main flow with tree cover and the other the ‘tunnel’ swim. I used a bait dropper to dispense a bed of pellet and hemp and then once the swim has settled, I fish over the top with a glugged sausage sizzle squab or 10mm boilie with a paste wrap. For the last hour hookbait is my favourite and most successful bait for Barbel, a big chunk of Garlic spam. The classic bait and wait approach.

I’ve lengthened the hair on my running rig to try and increase the amount of time the bait is in the water before a greedy Chub gets to it, it’s sort of working to an extent but after catching the same Chub with the distinctive tail for the fourth time within the space of two week and 4 different baits I’m considering a re-think. ‘once bitten, twice shy’, what’s a load of boll*cks that is, this particular Chub, needs to be educated :).  I stayed till dusk and beyond, sadly the isotope stayed static well apart from the odd time where a feeding bat caught the line.

As the depth does vary quite a bit so dragging a piece of meat on the bottom under a Chubber would be difficult but at least it’s a change of presentation. The method that may work however and that has been successful for me in the past is rolling meat, plasticine or some preston jumbo locking shot moulded over the line with a hook buried within a lump of spam, to get the bait moving or ‘rolling’ over the bottom.

One of the swims upstream is full of streamer weed so as the hook is buried when the meat gets stuck a simple tug will get it moving again. That’s the next Barbel session sorted, in-fact as it’s a roving method I might try and fish different parts of the Avon, a couple of miles apart.

I still enjoyed the evening as I caught fish, quite a few of them in-fact but none of my target species. I even had a nice fat dace on a 16mm squab; there are certainly plenty of fish here and fishing maggot you could ‘bag up’ if that’s your thing. The moon was full and bright when I left, just that scene made the trip at least worthwhile.