One of the main attractions of barbel fishing is the peculiar mix of highly predictable and frustratingly unreliable types of behaviour that the species is capable of. On occasion, they can appear to be so easy to catch, literally fighting over your bait and then attempting to pull your rod in as they  grab hold as soon as you cast in. The next session will see you trying every trick in your repertoire and yet failing to hook fish that are showing interest but are too cute to make a mistake that day. Watching barbel in the clear waters of the southern rivers enables you to see them behaving at both ends of this extreme behaviour, and also to identify them as individuals, sometimes showing themselves to be real characters.

As I write, it is mid-August and for me the season so far has been a fairly productive, with seventeen doubles from the middle Avon and  fifty-odd back-up fish. Yet the failures have been as rewarding as the successes, and there have been a lot of blank sessions when the fish have foxed me, to go with the more satisfactory  catches. My observations of the behaviour of Avon barbel has also brought some surprises, and taught me once again that what we know about them is eclipsed by what we do not.

The first double of the season was taken in textbook style, and  was in fact a fish that I caught last year from the same swim at much the same time.

Here was a stay-at-home fish, who, to my knowledge, has been taken at least twice by other anglers from the same swim. This fish is easily recognisable by the fact that he was a two-tone version, with a darker coloured front end, paler from the dorsal backwards. He was also a cranked, crooked-back barbell – a deformation that is fairly common , and not a particular disadvantage, as he is maintaining a weight of a bit over ten pounds quite consistently. I have also seen pike, dace and chub with this condition, and no doubt it is a spinal problem that is present from the fry stage. The Japanese give it a name that is unpronounceable and forgettable, but it is common in Koi carp, I am told.

I first spotted him, along with two other fish that turned out to be eleven-pounders, after I had trickled a few bits of my favourite John Baker boilies into the weed at the head of the swim. It is a difficult one to fish, very open and fast with a fan of thick weed at the upstream end.

More free boilies soon had the fish circling and grubbing about, but they were still very nervous when any tackle was introduced, and I was pretty sure they had not been caught yet this season, or perhaps they had. We do not realise how often the same fish are recaptured, and how much they can move about.

Anyway, their downfall was assured as soon as I perceived a small channel in the weed under the far bank that opened invitingly every few seconds as the surging current made the ranunculus sway rhythmically.

With a three-ounce inline lead, a short tail and a PVA bag containing both hookbait and  crumbled boilies, I was able to plop the bait into the channel well upstream of the fish.
I watched as ‘crooked back’ scuttled up into the channel  soon after casting, then  a few seconds later he shot off downstream with my hook in the corner of his mouth.
A pair of low elevens were to make a similar mistake during the next two evenings, along with some solid fresh-looking eight-pounders, fish that augur well for the future. The Avon barbel stocks are quite low for a river of its size and quality, but there are signs that the present cycle of fewer but bigger fish will be replaced with a sustainable generation of smaller ones. A tough little fish of about eight-inches was to make my reel scream on the bite a few days later!

Walking about and sprinkling boilies into likely-looking areas was to prove a successful technique for locating fish over the early weeks of the season, almost replacing the droppered hemp method I have been so used to. With a pocket of bait, including a ball of more highly flavoured paste, you can  stroll about and flick a few bits into likely swims, and I am now confident that  any fish in the area will at least show themselves in response. Although  I generally favour using freshly made boilies or bait that John B. will send freshly frozen, I have had a good deal of success with the ready made shelf life variety, and it is clear that sticking consistently to your chosen mix and flavour is good advice.

I soon found a good shoal of fish a day or two later, that had certainly not been fished for this year, such was the eagerness that they came out of the weed and started mopping up Mr Baker’s Magic Mix. I do not know what he puts in it, but this shoal of fish – perhaps ten strong – was soon ripping up the bottom in search of the crumbled bits of boilie I had introduced under the bank.

Big shoal
Ten fish is a really big shoal for the river, it is usual to spend a day fishing for four of five fish at most these days, with three in a day a very good catch. A couple of shoals had probably combined in this frighteningly fast shallow run, but the swim was possible to bait up under the rod top in a little slack away from the main flow, where fishing in fast, open water with a lot of the inevitable bits of drifting weed would have impossible.

At  one time I found it hard to lower a bait among a group of hungry barbel that were sending up clouds of silt from the little baited patch under my feet. That swim produced three doubles for me on the first day I fished it , including two twelves and a spanking fish of 10lb 15oz that epitomised the design of barbel for fast water life.

It had big strong fins, a solid muscular body, and a tail that had a rapier like upper lobe. A good candidate for growing on, and a prime argument against the stupid folly of stocking barbel into stillwaters. Fish so perfectly designed for a fast water life have no place sculling about in a pond with carp and bream.

Every fish I hooked in that swim hurtled off out into the current, off downstream, and then chugged powerfully back up and across into the dense weed opposite, all fantastic fights in a proper river!

One of the twelves I was to meet again, ten days later and getting on for three miles upstream.It was easily identified by a flat lower tail lobe, a distinctive anal fin, and several other features that make it one hundred per cent certainly the same fish, and it had made a determined effort to go as far away as it could from its first capture point.
We were filming with Hugh Miles and Martin Bowler for Hugh`s forthcoming TV series, and Hugh had required an Avon double for the camera. Having failed last year, catching a double the day before and after filming, but not on cue for the demanding Mr Miles, I was absolutely delighted to bag the fish at 12lb 10oz while the camera was running, and later we got some underwater footage in the swim that will be the best shots of barbel feeding seen to date.

To watch double-figure fish grubbing about, turning over stones, and shouldering each other about within inches of the lens is fascinating, and Hugh was as pleased with the fish beneath the surface as the ones on the bank. It was a delight, a lifetime experience to work with him and Martin on the series, and it promises to be a definitive piece of work, undoubtedly the best fishing programme we will have seen to date.

Puzzling
This twelve-pounder had made a journey that is hard to comprehend. I knew that they roamed to a certain extent, but from one perfectly good piece of habitat to another for no apparent reason is puzzling. Perhaps it is getting caught that upsets them, and yet there are fish, like the crooked back, that seem to like staying put.

There are certainly less big fish than we think in the river, but careful identification and logging is the only way to be sure how many of your doubles are recaptures. I always try and examine the fish for notable features, and  the fins on barbel are a good place to look for lumps and bumps and splits, as well as characteristic outlines.

The last fish I caught from the Ouse at Adams Mill demonstrates how distinctive fins can aid identification, how the fish travel, and of course how much they grow. At first capture, in August 1998, the fish was a fraction over ten pounds. I noticed at the time the dink in its tail, and used that feature to identify it as the same fish  I took in August 2004 barely ten yards from the first point of capture.

It had put on five pounds, probably true growth and not seasonal variation, and I heard it made a little over seventeen  at the end of the season.

That day I had worked hard to get one bite out of a shoal of very spooky barbel, no easier but no harder to catch than Avon fish that have been caught before, but this time the shoal comprised a fourteen-pounder with a crooked back, easily identified by the regulars, two fifteen plus fish, and a huge sandy coloured fish with a damaged tail that did no real feeding at all, no doubt The Traveller and probably nineteen pounds at the time.

Disgraceful
I have just spent a day dismally failing to catch fish that were possibly thirteens from the Avon, not really feeding but swimming about and idly pecking at the gravel, showing enough interest to keep you trying, but too crafty to do more than inspect hook baits cautiously. I will never fish the Mill again I expect, my views on the background politics and  disgraceful actions of the controlling club will see to that, but I do not mind, a fish is a big as you make it in your mind, and an Avon double is worth a lot in any comparison you could make between different rivers and the relative sizes and  merits of capture. Big barbel do not make good barbel anglers, that is for sure.
 

Back to the Avon, the best barbel river by far, and the most baffling barbel you could meet, mostly because you can see what they are up to. This can be as much of a disadvantage as  a benefit, however. There are times when you would do well to sit it out with a static bait and wait for them to gain confidence and work their way to your bait. Too much looking in and watching them can wind you up, make you as twitchy as them, and actually lead to failure rather than success when you try too hard, cast too often, and end over feeding or scaring the fish off.

Common practice
One of my most productive swims this year was upstream of a snag, and common practice had been to draw fish upstream and into a shallow run under the bank. When I fished it, they were very nervous barbel, and I was reluctant to even try and persuade them to come to a bated area where some had already been caught. I had an idea these fish were coming from way downstream, round the bend below the snag and the thick weed  and a deep hole offered them cover other than the tree branches the snag offered.

So, instead of fishing for fish I could see, I baited an area I could not see into, well below the snag, and settled back, casting blind and feeding a fairly slack hole five yards below the snag.

It worked a treat, and three doubles to 11lb 12oz and ten other fish in the six to nine-pound range in three trips had proved that  the fish had not found the snaggy tree as attractive as perhaps we thought they ought.

They were apparently happy to take baits in open water, albeit deeper than average, and not one made any attempt to get into the woodwork.

It was a real pleasure to play them out in open water, and it made a change not to spend  much of the time peering and squinting into the water to what the barbel were doing. There is nothing worse than looking into an empty swim, and it takes a lot of nerve, patience and confidence to wait them out when there are many occasions when they leave a swim for good for no real reason, having fed on your bait and you have not had time to cast in yet.
 
The essence of Avon barbeling is still the challenge of seeking them out, spotting them, watching their reactions, and of course using the opportunity to learn a tiny bit more about them.

This article was originally published in Coarse Angling Today