Avon Barbel — Stuck in the Stalls

The scores afternoon of the 19th of June

With the Blogger's Challenge off to a flyer,  most of the field round the first bend and out of sight, Hatt is stuck in the stalls...

It's not that I haven't had the inclination, I have! It's simply that I've found neither the time nor the cash required to fish. Every hour of the 50 days since this competition began have been spent earning money enough to pay off all the various expenses of living plus a punishing solicitors bill. It was worth it though. Without his assistance I might have been stuck in a property dispute the rest of my life. 

Thankfully the last instalment of that invoice is already earned, banked and ready to pay and so there's a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

But I simply cannot afford the license fee right now because £30, though not a great deal of money, is greater than I can afford when that bill comes first, subsistence second, fags and beer without which I cannot exist meaningfully rank third, but every other pocket pilfering requisite of life descend in order of necessity with fishing and all other enjoyable comforts and pleasures of least priority.

Martin arranges a compromise. He's clipped one of those coupons from the Anglers Mail so he can 'take a friend fishing,' so I get my code and off we set on an early season barbel mission down the Avon.

A new stretch this. Quite lovely in the moderate heat of late afternoon. How nice it is to fish and not be encumbered in swaddling layers of hi-tech cold defeating cloth, don't you agree? Deck shoes and bare ankles — what a luxury!

Interesting swims too. Bends and riffles, reedy glides, pools, slacks, swirling eddy currents, you name it, it has it. After an hour or two looking about at our prospects for the season ahead, we finally settle down to fish. Martin choosing a fairly shallow near bank pool with a nice snag that just has to hold fish and myself opting for a central run of fairly swift water creating deep back eddies near bank and far.

First cast I have a bite on bacon grill. It does not connect. But it was a chub bite anyhow as are the next, the fifth, tenth and last. By nine, with just an hour left on our clock, I'm certain this swim holds neither barbel nor a chub of a size to get the bait in its gob. And so, with just one move possible, I opt to go upstream and find myself a new swim.

After ten minutes of indecision when I cannot decide between three possible options, for no apparent reason I choose the dullest of them. Just a straight run of water between reed beds, with no real feature in the water to recommend it, but somehow, it looks, 'right'. So I settle in and I cast out. Downstream and mid-channel. 

I find with barbel that watching the rod top is the best way to put them off. They never bite when I have my eyes fixed rigidly upon it, and so I focus on the slowly drifting distant clouds instead, whose barely perceptible movement amplifies its potential violence of motion in the far corner of my right eye.

No twangs and bangs and plucks and pulls and rattles and what have you, here. The rod is, for the first time in hours, monumentally still. 

A million buzzer midge cloud vision. I watch the swarming fuzz but can't see one. But in a crystal moment perceiving both near and far at one and the same time, in the middle distance catch an individual in flight... 

The bail arm flips wide open. A great whirl of spiralling slack escapes the spool exiting the tip ring in a great rococo arabesque.

She's gone for certain but winding forward and   rectifying my lazy mistake, the line tightens, and... she's still on!

There's a dour battle for ground. For a while it's about who owns the hooking field. I do. So she proceeds upstream and midstream to a point where I pull downstream and then she decides to go for cover, into the reeds, my bank.

Barbel aren't chub, though...

She exits just as soon as she enters.

Silly girl.

7:11.

Best barbel of the Blogger's Challenge thus far, but that won't last long if Mr Martin Roberts has anything to do with it...

  

So here we have it. Race of the year. 18 jockeys, steeds champing at the bit, jostling in the stalls, and.... THEY'RE OFF!

Blogger's Challenge 2015/16, scroll the sheet above or click here to view the full spreasheet

Blogger's Challenge 2015/16

For those not yet aware of the above competition, Russel Hilton put forward the idea to George Burton that it might be a good idea to run something along the lines of those challenges the Coventry lads used to take part in some years back now. They were good fun, let me tell you. I made a lot of good friends because of them and so I guess did everyone else. The two I enjoyed the most were the percentage of record weight challenge; a simple idea but one that drove everyone involved to break multiple personal bests. Such was the drive to get out and do well that I broke eight, and bettered some of those over and over, once three times in the same day with consecutive crucians!

The second was the earlier challenge where a handful of us set out to achieve the record weight with multiple captures, so a fifteen pound tench would require an easily achievable four or five middling fish in the same session, yet a record weight zander would require the almost impossible task of two doubles in the same day, three 7 pounders, 5 and a half 4 pounders, or a very big catch of schoolies. No one achieved even half the total catch required to match the record for that particular species. Nevertheless, we all gave it our best.

Russel and George consulted me about their ideas. Of course, I got involved up to the hilt in its creation because I was really interested in the split between venue types and what that might mean in terms of competitive advantage and handicap. So, tench for instance (and all species, of course) are split between canal, river/drain, and stillwater with scores for each — one point for every percentage point of the record — and an aggregate overall total score

Of course, still water captures are going dominate the gross points for that species but catch a single river tench and any advantage gained by someone camping out for a really big fish at a lake will be reduced substantially but then go catch a canal specimen too and it might be brought to nought. I like that dynamic. It is a leveller of advantages and a punisher of lazinesses.

My favourite dynamic, though, is the ten point bonus for largest fish of each species in each category. So, if two competitors are fighting the tench corner and one gets largest still water fish but the other gets largest canal and river fish, then not only is the points advantage gained by a really huge still water specimen reduced, but the second competitor may actually win the tench category outright on a lesser percentage points total but greater bonus points.

To be honest I don't quite know what the bonus system might produce. Without prior experience who could? But I do like the idea of a wild card that can make or break things, and especially during the end game of the competition when things can tend toward stalemate with a clear winner and his runners up emerging long before close of play.

With ten points available here and there and everywhere across the board then things should become very interesting indeed at that time. Early on, a mere ten points is nowhere near the 50 to 70 that can be gained by catching a very large specimen. But late on it's very hard to make an extra ounce over or even under other captures. When only one or two point advantages can be gained for beating someone by an ounce or two, ten can be gained by adventurous fishing in another more trying category and nailing best fish!

The leader board sheet of the spreadsheet computes all the scores, adds and subtracts bonus points automatically too, and all from simple weight data entered by competitors. There's leader boards for all the venue types as well, so no doubt there will be sub-competitions going on.

I love it!!

From prior experience I know I'll never become overall champion

But, 'King of the Cut?'

I wouldn't mind that at all.


There's eleven anglers already signed up and raring to go come Mayday. So, if you're interested in becoming involved too, then find out more and get in touch with Russel, here ~

Blogger's Challenge 2015/16

Poisson d’Avril

Of course we had to go back for one last chance before the perch, the female kind of whom last time out were as fat as feck and venting eggs, finally popped their corks and went all size zero on us.

The weather was remarkably similar to that of the previous trip and the pattern of bites very much the same, but after enduring carp after carp after carp, finally a proper perch, or something very like one, was on the bank, and a very big one too...

We weren't at all sure, though. It just didn't look quite 'right' in the hand. Nevertheless, I was sincerely hoping for a PB so when I got home I made a hopeful phone call to a fellow I know — highly regarded as an expert in these matters — who to my crushing disappointment informed me that what I had wasn't a true perch at all but actually a very rare hybrid know to the French as 'Poisson d’avril'. 

He didn't say what it was hybridised with, exactly, but intimated that the rogue parent may have been something going by the Latin name of Summus testiculis...

I tell you, I felt a proper nana. All that way, a fiver worse off, and all I had to show for it was a sore arse, an aching arm, and a prize lemon...

~

Now a real perch of such enormity should be available to anyone. They are hard to find, of course, but not at all hard to catch and require no particular skill, no great finesse, and little in the way of specialised approaches. Fishing a commercial pool for them is about the simplest style of fishing it's possible to imagine. A float, a large hook, some shot and a worm or prawn fished on the bottom is what just about everybody rigs up with. They'll place the bait in the margins, spread a little ground bait around the spot, perhaps chopped prawn or worm with a handful of maggots too, and then sit back to wait.

That's what I do. Yet I don't catch large perch. Everyone else does though, and they do it with comparative ease. Why should this be? How can it be? 

You have to understand that I have caught just as many perch as my friends have, so the likelihood of a large one turning up from time to time on my hook should have been equal. However, that has not been the case. None have. 

I don't have the same problem with Barbel, for instance. If I sit down at a river and cast a bait after them  then it's very likely I'll catch one around double figures if I catch one that day. I rarely catch barbel because I rarely fish for them but when I do then small fish are not my lot. Big fish are. I simply don't have any trouble catching them, never have, and so I'm confident that I will.

Now, imagine that you come barbel fishing with me and catch small fish around the four to six pound mark on a regular basis but none larger, yet I frequently catch much larger fish than that and often over double figures. Now imagine that situation persisting year in, year out, and occurring every single time we go after barbel. There's no difference in our baits, no difference in the way we fish those baits, and we swap and chop swims with each other to even out the chances. That's how my perch situation stands today. 

It is simply inexplicable. But the statistics are phenomenal. I reckon I may have caught a hundred or more around the pound and a half mark now. I stopped counting years ago. It may be far more. Of course my friends have also caught plenty of fish the same size but less than I have because one in every three of their captures over the pound mark will be a 2lb fish and one in every ten, 3lbs or more. 

I don't know what it is. Perhaps a slight difference in bait placement. A gnats cock of patience I don't possess that they do. Maybe big perch smell the taint of tobacco, but that can't be true because Danny Everitt was a smoker when he caught a four pounder a few years ago. and I was there when he had a three from the same venue the year after. And don't be fooled into thinking that the pictures above are those of my own solo efforts. Knowing of my glass ceiling and feeling it his duty to help me break through it, Danny kindly escorted me to one of his best canal perch swims and there instructed me how to fish it. I followed his commands to the tee. That fine net of fish is Danny's usual fare, not mine. In fact it was well below his expectations... 

If I'd gone alone I'd have not caught the two-pounders, only the smaller ones, I swear!

Is it simply a confidence thing, then? Well', I don't fish for perch without confidence because I know for certain that I will catch them. I don't lack confidence in my ability to catch large ones either because I know enough about numbers to understand that given time large fish will fall because, as I have said, there's no great skill in it and large perch are just as wise as their smaller brethren, which is not very. Predatory fish do not require wisdom, nor do they seem to acquire it. They are not prey. 

Roach? Well yes. Big roach are clever fish who grow large by taking up position in the centre of the shoal using their smaller flanking shoal mates as protection against perch and pike. They are wary in the extreme. Perch shoals, though, are harrying mobs who chase and corral prey quite oblivious to the fact that they themselves might be quarry too...

They are hunted by us. But they don't know that. At least that's true in your case. 

But they certainly seem to know when I'm on the prowl!