Improve Your Coarse Fishing (UK)
Paul Garner
Big-fish expert Paul Garner goes beneath the surface to reveal how simple rig and bait tweaks will boost your catches
The secret life of barbel
OF ALL our coarse fish barbel have probably been filmed and studied more than any other. From the original videos produced by Guy Robb and Stuart Morgan to the fantastic underwater footage captured by Stu Walker and Bob Roberts right up to the current videos being made by Mark Barrow, we know a lot about barbel and their ways.
I have made my own small contribution to this knowledge bank with some underwater filming on larger rivers too. The results are fascinating and for the barbel fishing aficionado I would highly recommend searching them out.
Barbel are not the most difficult fish to catch, but they can at times be frustrating. We can probably piece together many of the reasons for our lack of success by looking at their behaviour. An understanding of what they are doing and why can definitely influence tactics and improve your results.
Days and nights
One of the clearest patterns that we see in barbel catches is that the fish appear to come on the feed as the light levels drop in the evening. Often, you can be sitting all day without a bite and then the fishing picks up as soon as the sun drops below the horizon. This is only part of the story and a lot may be going on below the surface.
Like all coarse fish, barbel don’t only feed when the light levels are low. They will feed, and get caught, during the height of a summer
“Where the water shallows up and becomes will gravelly is where you catch the most”
day, but tactics have to be more refined and fish need to be located with pinpoint accuracy during the day for sound biological reasons.
Barbel mainly feed on invertebrates, ranging from snails and caddis fly larvae, down to tiny bloodworms. The highest concentrations of many of these creatures are found on shallow gravel stretches of the river, called riffles. Here the density of fish food can be many times higher than in deeper, silt-bottomed stretches.
Generally speaking, these tiny morsels are easier for fish to catch when the light levels are low. During the day the invertebrates hide away under stones and in the bottom, where they are difficult to extract. At night though they will often come to the surface of the riverbed in huge numbers. Many will also drift downstream and yet more will emerge from the water as adults around dawn and dusk. All this means that the optimal time for barbel, and other fish, to feed is from dusk onwards.
The nocturnal abundance of natural food for barbel explains why they tend to feed at night, but there is another reason. You might expect barbel to stay close to their feeding areas, even when not hungry, but often they will travel considerable distances up and down rivers. The reason for this probably comes down to predation. A barbel sat in shallow water is an easy target for a predator, whereas one sat deep within a snag is perhaps safer. This is why barbel can often be found in snaggy spots, particularly with overhead cover, during the day. Barbel become easier to catch from dusk onwards not just because they are more actively feeding but because they are also moving upstream from resting zones to their feeding areas. If you are fishing anywhere between these two areas barbel are going to move past you, giving you a chance to catch some.
If you want to consistently catch barbel in the day it is essential to find the swims where they rest up. You will catch them from a much wider area at night, but often the swims that correspond to their feeding spots, where the water shallows up and becomes gravelly, are where you will catch the most.
You will also tend to find that a much wider range of baits work when barbel are actively feeding after dark. Bigger baits, such as boilies and meat, come into their own when barbel are on the prowl.
Daylight tactics
All underwater filming featuring barbel has taken place during daylight. So there’s nothing showing when they are considered to be most catchable. Yet, we still see plenty of interesting behaviour.
One key aspect that we see during the day is how important feeding is in converting relatively inactive barbel into fish that are searching for food. Regular feeding, particularly with small baits, such as hemp and casters, will gradually encourage barbel to feed with greater confidence and become more catchable.
The fish might not be encouraged to travel far from cover though, and certainly having rigs in the water when they are still nervous will not help. This is basically the time-honoured ‘bait and wait’ strategy that barbel anglers have employed for decades. What underwater filming has done is proved why this tactic is so successful.
How long does it take the barbel to start feeding confidently? This really depends upon the conditions, but anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours can be required. We can probably explain that other key trigger for brilliant barbel sport by thinking about natural feeding and predation risk. Floods often stimulate barbel to go on the feed and make them much more catchable. Could it be that the lower light levels created by mucky water give the barbel confidence that they are safe from predators? Are the natural invertebrate prey disturbed by the faster currents during floods and so easier to pick off? Certainly, radio-tracking studies have shown that barbel often move long distances during floods, and are much more active, corroborating what we believe.
Patrol routes
When a shoal of barbel are in your swim it is easy to think that they will settle on a bed of bait, but often this is far from the truth. They actually move around a lot more than we think, gliding in over bait, perhaps sucking in a mouthful or two, before processing the edible from the inedible, band coming in again. Shoals of barbel have quite a structured way of feeding with groups of fish approaching the feed from below, working upstream, before peeling off and heading back down the swim. Interestingly, these barbel spend a lot more time away from the riverbed than we imagine. Often the fish will be a foot or more above the bottom, cruising around, before dropping down to feed. They are also very active, and may swim up past the bait, in the search for more food. Actual feeding takes up a very small percentage of their time, perhaps no more than 10 per cent. The rest of the time they are on the move. In open swims and on larger rivers the movements can appear to be more or less random. On smaller rivers, especially if there are weedbeds for the fish to hide under, or perhaps a change in depth, they will follow the same patrol routes up and down the swim. With all this moving around it is no surprise that line bites are common. While liners may spook them evidence suggests that this isn’t the end of the world, and they will often return to feed.
Line bites
An aspect of barbel behaviour that I have filmed quite intensively is how line bites are generated. This intrigued me because I had a hunch that those slow pulls on the rod top followed by the tip springing back were not, as most people assume, cause by barbel brushing against the hooklength. By fixing cameras in place of a feeder I was able to observe barbel moving around and bumping into the line and this, combined with me pulling and moving the line in wadeable swims, proved that was actually occurring. In fact, because there is normally a heavy feeder or leger on the line, movements of the hooklength are isolated from the angler. Fish can be knocking into the hooklength all the time, but you won’t know a thing about it by watching the rod tip. True line bites were caused by barbel bumping into the line above the feeder. This makes sense because the concentration of food here attracts the barbel, and the mainline is often rising quite steeply off the riverbed. Prevent this by letting out slack line, which forms a bow downstream in the current.
Anti- eject rigs
It’s often said that barbel have ‘anti-eject mouths’ and that once they pick up a bait they are as good as hooked. Not so! When filming barbel feeding on the River Wye I was shocked to watch a barbel happily pick up a boilie hookbait and start to move off, only for the bait (and hook) to trickle out the side of its mouth. This happens more often
than I had ever suspected and forced me to take another look at my rigs. The most important factor in improving hooking is using the right hook pattern. One with a curved shank or a fitted line-aligner tends to catch if it touches the bottom of the mouth/lip, at which point it normally bolts. Other hook shapes are less efficient at this.
Because we tend to use long hooklengths when barbel fishing there is a lot of potential for the fish to pick up the hookbait and spit it out without the line tightening and the hook pricking the fish. My solution is to add some weight six inches above the hook. This helps to set the hook correctly. A couple of split shot, or a piece of tungsten putty moulded around a float stop, does the job perfectly.
Find, feed and catch
Catching barbel is not all together difficult, especially if you fish from dusk, or during floods, when they are actively moving around and searching for food. The fish will tolerate a degree of clumsiness and crude tactics when they are active, but this only half of the story.
Being successful when the fish are less inclined to feed is often much more tricky, coming down to a combination of watercraft and feeding to first locate and then gain the confidence of the fish. In many ways we have learned much more through underwater filming when they are trickier to catch in small, clear rivers where it is possible to watch their behaviour. This proves that barbel can be caught in almost all conditions, the secret is to be adaptable and use tactics that a tuned to the conditions and the behaviour of the fish