Top specialist angler Adrian Eves has opened his account on the River Kennet with a terrific brace of fish in abysmal conditions. We leave it to Adrian to tell the story in his own words:

“It was my first trip of the season to the River Kennet and, not surprisingly, it was raining very hard! Given the conditions rather than roving about I decided to sit it out in one swim.

I used a bait dropper to get about a pint of Dynamite Baits’ garlic hemp and another pint of mixed pellets down the near side run, I then rested the swim for an hour before lowering a 10mm pellet hookbait with a PVA bag filled with pellets and some crushed boilies. I was using size 10 Kuro S2 hook with a 2ft Coretex hooklink and a 2oz Kling-on lead.

It was a fairly long wait before I had my first barbel, weighing in at 8lb 8oz. I then had to wait until just after dark before a savage take resulted in this skinny specimen of 12lb 3oz, a great start to my river season and it even stopped raining for the walk back to the car!”