Tag Archives: River Trent

With the rain this week I decided to make a rare trip to the Trent after barbel. I knew the river would be high with plenty of colour so I wanted to use the smelliest baits I had. I found half a pot of The Hook Bait Co. Big Squid boilies from 2016 in the garage. They still looked and smelled good as new, so into the bag they went! I only had 5 hours to fish and I knew location would be paramount. I had the stretch to myself, so I baited marginal spots in 3 swims. Four Spoppers of mixed pellets laced with Nimrod oil, garlic oil and hemp oil went into each swim. In these conditions I favour leads & PVA stockings over swim feeders, and I also used back leads to keep debris off the lines. For hook baits I opted for a Garlic Nimrod & The Big Squid combo – one of each on the hair. All was quiet in the first swim, but after an hour in the second swim I had a good take on my downstream rod. After a tough, but thankfully uneventful fight I managed to net the barbel at the …

Read More »

This a short article I wrote for www.fishingmagic.com, expressing the magic and allure of river fishing, along with my hopes & thoughts about the upcoming river season. The magic & allure of river fishing I grew up in an area where there were plenty of ponds within cycling distance, but the nearest rivers that were fishable were just a bit too far away. No-one in my family fished, so I had nobody to introduce me to river fishing, which meant that my early angling years were spent primarily beside stillwater, rather than flowing. This gave rivers a certain mystery, as I would catch glimpses of them on school trips (Monsal Dale and Dovedale), family days out (Matlock Bath, Newark, Tissington, Bakewell) or a fleeting vision from a car (the powerful Sawley weir, from the M1). Often I would see people fishing, or spot fish in the crystal clear waters and I felt drawn to these tranquil, serpentine venues that were – for the most part – out of my reach. On the few occasions I was taken to fish a river something always seemed to happen (the ‘something’ was usually in the shape of an eel…). Whether it was catching …

Read More »

Caught In The Act is the ambitious latest project from Bob Roberts and Stuart Walker; the duo behind the successful and enlightening (it certainly taught me plenty about how barbel and rigs behave underwater) “Barbel Days and Ways” series, which features some terrific underwater footage.  I am a fan of that series of DVDs and when I heard that this new series was in the making, which dramatically expanded the range of species targeted, I had high hopes for it. The complete films are the result of over 3 years of angling trips to day ticket & open-access club waters, after a variety of species over all four seasons.  Each session is chronicled as a short “act” and there are ten acts in this 2 DVD set, which covers Spring & Summer fishing (Autumn & Winter will follow later in the year as a separate double-disc set).  Stu and Bob don’t have the benefit of an on-hand professional cameraman to film their sessions but instead call upon their own filming experience from making “Barbel Days…” and film each other.  When one is fishing, the other does the filming and vice-versa.  Both Bob and Stu are extremely accomplished anglers, which means that when …

Read More »

This is just a quick, but very important, post. The Angling Trust is urging all anglers out there (AT members or not), to respond to an Environment Agency consultation about their “best practice guidelines” for potentially destructive and controversial Hydropower schemes. The public can add comments to the consultation without logging in to the EA website, which will help sway decisions made about future legislation imposed upon the operators of these schemes. This type of electricity-generation scheme looks set to become more widespread in the UK but through both water abstraction and the fish-mincing turbines which are driven by water flow to generate electricity, such schemes pose a massive danger to both resident and migratory fish stocks and the quality & availability of river fishing. This particular consultation focuses on setting water flow rates & abstraction limits and it’s important that angling, fish stocks and other environmental issues are given utmost consideration when setting these limits. As anglers we need to ensure that opinion swings in this direction, which is why the Angling Trust has offered advice on how to respond to the consultation, to ensure we’re all pulling in the same direction.  Please take a few minutes to read through the information and guidance on the Angling Trust website and …

Read More »

I only had time to get out fishing once between Christmas and new year.  I’d had a pike fishing itch to scratch for a while and despite conditions which were far from ideal (after the bout of mild weather and heavy rain), I decided to pike fish on the River Dove. The Dove is a spate river and therefore it’s notorious for the speed at which the level rises and colour increases. So it was to my dismay, but no surprise, that I arrived to find the river coloured and rising! I should have been barbel fishing in conditions like this but my heart was set on piking, so I had left my barbel rods at home! I stuck it out regardless and fished to the conditions as best I could, but I only got a single dropped run all day. A run I didn’t even notice at the time because my float, cast to the far bank, would only stay in the slack water if I let out a big bow of line. Not an issue in itself, however, it was an extremely blustery day and the combination of wind and the flow meant my float was constantly dancing around all …

Read More »

I haven’t posted a “true” blog post for a while now, I seem to have been abusing this blog and using it mainly as an interactive advertising board for other things I’ve been up to. My own fishing has been very disappointing lately (more on that later), and I turn 30 in a couple of weeks, so I’m in quite a reflective mood and thought this was an opportune time to fill in on how 2011 was for me in fishing… 2011 started off very slowly for me. A multitude of reasons have left me spending far less hours on the bank than I would have liked to, but thankfully most sessions I’ve made the most of the time I had and caught some reasonable fish. I only had chance to fit in one session before March, but then managed a couple more river sessions before the season ended.  The only fish I landed during this period were a few pike, topped off by an 18lb 13oz beauty, which I blogged about here. Once the rivers closed, my fishing mainly went on a self-induced hiatus. Buying my first home became the priority and despite ours being a relatively straight-forward purchase (so we were assured by the estate agents!), …

Read More »

I got this season’s predator campaign off to a great start last week, when I tackled the Trent near Nottingham.  After fishing elsewhere all day to try and catch perch, river carp and barbel, I arrived at the river about an hour before sunset, having caught none of the species I‘d been trying for.  I hadn’t managed to catch any fresh deadbaits either, so all the zander bait I had with me was a frozen pack of 5 small roach.  It was going to be tough to make them last, but targeting zander I was only expecting a couple of runs anyway. My simple deadbait rig for zander, incorporating a buoyant leger boom I setup two rods with low-resistance run rings, which I’d adapted and added some small pieces of foam to pop the rig up and keep the line out of the Autumn debris on the riverbed.  There are similar items on the market, called leger stems, but I’ve never been happy with their quality so I make my own.  They’re simple and cheap and I’ll go through exactly how I put them together in a future feature.  The run ring rests on a run rig rubber, which incorporates …

Read More »

After more than a month of abstinence from fishing, I finally got myself back out on the bank between Christmas and New Year. I had a few new bits of tackle – mainly Christmas presents – to try out too. The first trip was an ill-advised, two hour drive to Boston with Craig and his mate Arran, only for us to find all of the drains were still completely frozen over with a good 3 to 4 inches of ice! After a brief bout of self-deprecation for not calling a local tackle shop to check, a swift re-think was required. We needed to find some flowing water to be guaranteed some ice-free fishing. The nearby Witham was an option but, as none of us had ever really pulled up any trees on there, we opted to head back as far as Newark and try a stretch of the Trent which none of us had fished before. It was close to a boatyard and seemed a logical place for us to find some lethargic pike seeking food close to shelter. Craig quickly caught a small jack, probably less than a couple of pounds, and that was it as far as action …

Read More »

Well, after my last post virtually declaring September as a “lost month” as far as my fishing results were concerned, a good fish comes along and gives me a slightly more rose-tinted view of September 2010 after all! I travelled a little farther afield than usual and endured a gruelling day fishing for perch, with very disappointing results. The weather was overcast all day, the river was fairly clear and to be honest, I considered the conditions to be perfect for perch fishing.  However, the closest I came to catching a big perch was a missed take on a spinner early on, which felt like a perch and also felt heavy. Then an hour later I was lure fishing in a shallow, gravelly run when I got an amazing follow. The bow-wave created was huge! It zig-zagged behind my lure and took one final swipe, but missed. I’m pretty sure I saw the mouth of a perch as it made that final grab and I’m also sure that a pike would have had the small lure well down its throat long before that anyway! After a few hours of throwing lures around and failing to catch even a micro-perch, I …

Read More »

Well, I finally got myself out fishing last Thursday! After hearing of a few pike starting to be caught around the country, I gave into my urges and decided I’d target them.  After speaking to the bailiff on a stretch of the tidal Trent, I opted to try there. I haven’t really done much fishing in general on the tidal, let alone pike fishing, but I made my decision based on the water clarity being better than the non-tidal stretches, and the changing tides forcing fish to alter their positions, which would hopefully result in them spotting my bait in the process. With such cold conditions being set in for so long this winter, every species of fish will be lethargic – even those more associated with winter – so the fish will need a reason to move, be it hunger or the changing tide.  By doubling the possibilities, I’d double my chances… I thought! S..   L..   O..   W..  was the general pace of the day. I arrived, just after dawn (Hit the “snooze” button a couple of times too many!), to find I had the entire stretch to myself. Awesome; a whole stretch of prime-condition river filled with undisturbed specimen pike just …

Read More »