Warwickshire Avon - Pamphysicisms and Pachyderms

Tackle in and out the car, rods on the roof bars and then taken off to put in the quiver, I was in one of the indecisive modes where I just really know what I was going to fish for.

In the end with a festival happening down the road I decided to have a couple of hours up until dusk to try and winkle out a Barbel. whilst listening to other people having fun. The speakers must have been pretty hefty too judging by the low frequencies the set-up was delivering. 

The problem was when I got the gear out the car I'd realised I'd forgot my rod rest the cows not happy I had to remove a likely looking branch and fashion something together. This ultimately may well have been ones downfall, more of that later.

As I was making my way to the swim I bumped in to a blog reader Sean who congratulated me the recent  capture of the canal double that put the end to the quest.

He'd managed to winkle out a Barbel earlier on meat so I was hopeful for a bite when the sun started to set. Now Sean himself had caught the same double figure canal Zander a few times at an area I'd tried myself over the years without any of the success he'd had.

What wasn't nice to see though was a picture he had on his phone of a rather large Zander that had been seen to by an otter up at Bascote locks. It was there in plain sight without any dignity whatsoever, as usual only a small amount of the flesh eaten and its bloated stomach a result of its demise. As we know Otters are in good numbers now no matter the waterway and before Sean left he came to see how I was doing one had the pomposity to surface in his swim.

Now before Sean bid his goodbye after a few bangs on the rod top I decided to see if the meat was still on as I reeled in an eel was hanging on for dear life and when I saw it and it saw me it released its jaws and went back to where it came from.

I try and avoid chub if I'm fishing for Barbel hence the rather large piece of spam, and its this big meat method that was been good to me in the past having caught two 12 lb barbel despite how cumbersome it looks. With dusk approaching the eels were becoming a pest in-fact the meat was only out for 10 minutes and it came back looking nothing like it went out, it was being mullered. 

I'd imagine using 50p pence size pieces of meat I would have banked a few by now, but not exactly what I after as I might of made a change to ones set-up. With 10 minutes before kicking off time out of the blue a really powerful bite that took the makeshift bendy rod rest by surprise. 

I will never know if it was a barbel or not but without the rod top for the hook to react against the 4 foot twitch turned in to limp and lifeless line and nada on the end, BALLS !!!!