Lines, leads and hooks
No matter where I fish, be it the Severn, Warwickshire Avon, Dove, or pretty much any river, my rigs are virtually the same. The only difference usually is the size of the lead used to hold bottom, which can be anything between 1 and 5oz, depending on river conditions, flow, amount of debris present and so on.
I fish with two rods for the bulk of the time, which happen to both be Daiwa 1.75tc barbel rods, each one used with a Shimano 6000 baitrunner, loaded with 12lb Daiwa sensor. My reasons for using this line? - well, it's cheap and durable, you get miles of the stuff for a tenner or so, which means you
can change it regularly, something which I like to do when fishing for barbel. A good fish will usually run through something under the water surface if it can find it, so the line takes a fair bit of stick, so I like to know I can trust my mainline.
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| Pallatrax the Hook |
Hooks for pellet and boilies are always the Pallatrax 'The Hook' hook, which is best hook out there in my opinion, very strong, and I've had no problems with this pattern at all. I carry these in sizes 8-16. The Gamakatsu GP202/GP203 hooks are also good if you can get hold of them, but they are now a discontinued pattern. For fishing meat, I use the Drennan Super Specialist in a size 2 - meat is a big bait, so there's no point messing around.
I use a lead clip system for attaching leads, any will do really, whatever you are comfortable with, they are much of a muchness. I use them with size 8 swivels, semi-fixed, so there's no worrying about fish getting snagged up or tethered by leads in the event of a break. Leads are the same, any will go, flat ones are better, or grippers do the job
Feeders - well I don't use them much, during a flood maybe, or when fishing the Severn in some pegs. A cheap option is to buy the Drennan gripmesh feeders and attach a dead cow lead to them, this way you get a nice compact feeder with anything up to 6oz of lead on. Recently, I've had some made by a guy called Lee Barlow, they seem very good, you can find him on Facebook, under 'Lee's leads and feeders', well worth a look.
Baits, feed and feeding
For me, pellet reigns supreme when barbel fishing, I almost always start a session with pellet on both rods, and see how things go from there. If I fail to get a response after an hour or so, then I might start changing things around, but I'd say 90% of my fish are taken on pellets, I have great confidence in it. My pellets of choice are elips, which makes me no different from hundreds of barbel anglers. I think these pellets are a fabulous bait for both barbel and chub, being super-oily. I hair rig them, either two pellets superglued back to back, or a single pellet on a lasso.
In coloured water, I'll often use a paste wrap on a single pellet, my paste being homemade from anything that's around....oxo cubes, garlic, groundbait etc.
If pellet fails, I'll try a boilie or two, either whole or fished broken on a hair, my boilies too, are homemade, but I do use the commercially available ones also.
Then there's meat, which I only have real confidence in when the water is coloured, but I've had some success with this bait, both static and rolling it through the swim, a method which I'll probably video blog about in due course.
As I rarely use feeders, most of my feeding is done via loosefeeding and using PVA bags. I'm also a big fan of hemp, often putting down a three or four pint carpet of this down at the start of sessions. That said, a softly, softly approach is usually the better bet, feel your way into the session, similar to the way I would fish a match. But I'm still learning, and my approach to barbel is evolving all the time, in a few months time I may have completely changed around the way I fish, as with all branches of our sport, it's changing all the time.
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