Barbel on the pole? Try it this week!
In swims where you can’t get a trot through, pole fishing rules
THINK barbel on a pacey river and the last thing you’d get out of the bag would be a pole.
Yet on its day 11m of carbon can outfish the feeder or a running line float attack, allowing you to feed with pinpoint precision.
Forget about the danger of the pole breaking when playing this hard-fighting fish – modern carptype poles are well up to the job provided you gear up with the right elastics, hooks and line and use common sense when the float goes under.
Kelvin Tallett has bagged plenty of barbel from his local Warwickshire Avon on the pole, tackling raging swims you’d normally walk past if you wanted to fish the float or feeder.
The Daventry match angler agreed to show our cameras how to tame a barbel or three on the pole from the Seven Meadows section (Stratford-upon-Avon AAcontrolled at £5 a day on the bank) so we camped out on a peg just below a foaming weir pool.
“It can’t be fished with a float because there’s only a very short run before it shallows up, and the feeder is a non-starter because barbel prefer a bait with some movement to it. The pole, to me, seems the ideal solution,” Kelvin said. “It’s precise when it comes to feeding and positioning the hookbait, which I can keep moving. There’s 11ft of water immediately below the weir, it then shallows to a short, flat 8ftdeep section before tailing off to around a foot. It’s on that flat spot that I’ll be fishing.”
Tackle has to be up to the job, and Kelvin sees no reason why the pole shouldn’t work. “You’d fish it to catch a 15lb carp on a lake, so why not for an 8lb barbel on the river?”
His pole though, is not a match job. Instead, he gears up with a super-powerful Daiwa Yank ‘n Bank margin model that can easily handle the pressure. Through it he rigs up Red Hydrolastic. In a swim relatively free of snags, lines are 0.22mm main to a 0.16mm hooklink and a size 12 Drennan Wide Gape hook.
“This peg has all the flow in the top few feet with very little below. As a result, the float will drift all over the place, injecting movement into the bait,” Kelvin explained. “I fish a 6g DH12 float and hold it on a tight line, allowing the flow alone to move the rig naturally around the peg with the bait fished 6ins overdepth.”
Kelvin prefers natural baits to pellets, reasoning that the barbel see so many pellets that they’ve become a bit old hat. However, they can’t resist casters, maggots and hemp as feed with a bunch of red maggots on the hook.
“Given the pace –it’s all over the place – the only sensible way to feed is with a bait dropper, as I can
drop the feed exactly where I want it,” he said. “I’ll fill it with an equal mix of maggot, caster and hemp and put in three loads at the start. After that I’ll hopefully get bites and when these tail off, that’s the cue to give the swim two more droppers of bait.”
Rigged up and with the feed in the peg, Kelvin lowers the rig in and waits. The float isn’t still and sometimes goes the opposite way to the natural flow, but he’s not bothered – it’s giving the hookbait that bit of life and after a short wait, the float flies under and barbel number one is on.
“The fish will tear off at the start so I add a few sections of pole to follow it out,” Kelvin grimaced as he took the strain.
“With heavy elastic and strong line and hooks you can let the tackle do its job. On
this peg there is an underwater wall of rocks halfway across, so the fish can’t go any further and I can stop the first run quickly. Even so, the job is far from done.”
Barbel hug bottom when hooked and don’t move off it lightly, so it takes a further five minutes of grunt and groan to get the fish within netting range. At 7lb it’s a fine fish.
No more bites follow, so Kelvin adds two more droppers of feed and snares a second fish quickly, followed by a couple of chub, which sit happily alongside the barbel. A third smaller barbel turns up after he’s fed once again.