Tag Archives: Barlow Fishery

2019 UPDATE – Unfortunately there have been some major changes since I published this page, so I intend to replace it soon with a new resource to help children and beginners get into fishing. Kevin Miles no longer offers angling tuition. Barlow Lakes is now under new ownership and has been rebranded as “Barlow Country Club“. They are hoping to offer their own angling tuition & tackle hire and will open an on-site tackle shop in the near future. Exciting times ahead! There are now many events organised in school holidays where children can try fishing for free or learn to fish for free – with tuition and use of tackle included. Sadly we’ve moved into an era where independent fishing tackle shops are closing down (or being bought out by massive tackle shop chains) and there is a general decline in the fishing tackle trade, mirrored by a rapid decline in junior rod licences issued. Therefore, it’s never been more important to encourage new blood into angling. I’m passionate about this and I don’t believe the “big-name” anglers or the tackle industry do enough to encourage our nation’s youth (obviously there are a few exceptions). That’s why I’m devoting …

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Roach fishing is something I very seldom do, in fact I cannot remember the last time I set out to specifically catch roach, except maybe to use as pike baits! Unsurprisingly, my roach PB has never been anything to shout about; I don’t know exactly what my biggest roach was, but it was certainly below 1lb. The positive of this was that there’s a lot of room left for improvement! Through the grapevine I heard of a local day ticket water which had produced a few large roach to pleasure anglers over the summer months. It was time to try for my first big roach and this seemed the perfect place to start. I remembered reading an article last year about the virtues of flavouring maggots with super-sweet flavours such as scopex, in helping to tempt winter roach to feed. So I got hold of some strong scopex bait spray and sprayed this onto my maggots, twice a day, for two days prior to the session. The smell was unbelievable! Despite being sealed in a large bucket inside the shed, you could smell scopex in the garden with the shed door shut! I met up with my good friend Kevin …

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