Enticing barbel upstream.

[Robert Woods]

Can you entice barbel upstream so you can fish for them...?

 

[Fred Bonney]

Yes.
Far easier than trying to entice them downstream.
Put your "ground" bait in and wait for them to pick up, either the sound of the bait hitting the water, or the flavour leakage.

 

[Paul Morley]

Certainly after dark, dragged em out of cover etc. on Ribble and Wye. Just make sure the feed is on the deck and not belting off due to your dropper opening incorrectly!!

 

[Cakey]

Fred you cant entice them downstream ,you can only scare them downstream

 

[Robert Woods]

I went for a closed season mooch on River Dane. I threw in some pellets and chub swam downstream to them...? So must have been sound that attracted them.

 

[Mr Cholmondeley-Corker (PaSC)]

Robert

Did you mean - enticing barbel FROM upstream?

 

[Robert Woods]

I recently saw a few nice barbel in Severn but banks were too high to get down to them. So I was wondering if they can be "lead" upstream some 30 yards to where I can get down bank.

 

[klik2change]

Let's get this right. YOU are upstream of the location of the fish. IF that is the case, it ought to be possible for you to entice them to come to you, as scents and flavours will follow the flow downstream from your bait. Another question is whether the stream from your bait will reach the fish, or miss them, as it would, say, if there is a crease between the stream from your baits, and the stream in which the target fish lie.
Rivers are always in a state of turbulence, which tends to be more or less chaotic.

By "stream", I am suggesting that if you threw a negatively weighted boilie into the river next to your bait, it would be carried by the flow, straight to your target fish and would not miss them by a yard or more, which would be easily enough for them not to notice the scent of your baits. On the other hand, scents are probably carried over a far wider stream than one carrying a negatively weighted boilie or something like that. It would still be very difficult to tell if it reached them though... I suppose a "proof" might be if they immediately came upstream and took your bait.

On the other hand, if the the fish are UPstream of your swim, you could try throwing pellets towards them. They make a popping sound when they hit the water, however I have my doubts whether barbel would be attracted in such a way.

I dont know why someone else has not tried to answer your question properly. However, Robert, that somebody might disagree with me. Let's see shall we? Perhaps you do?

 

[The bad one]

God man! I'm not being funny or extracting the wee water here, but have we really in 20- 30 years, forgot, lost that knowledge base of the river match anglers of drawing the fish across and up river? Even nicking the fish off the bloke in the next peg and bringing them into your swim.

The mags, comics of the time were full of how to do it! I don't think there was a week/month went by without some name of the day telling you how to feed a swim to draw fish up the river.

 

[Robert Woods]

Phil,
How far can you draw barbel upstream...?

 

[Fred Bonney]

klik2change, your thoughts assume that scent travels only in the current, a bait in the water may change the chemical buidup of all the water in the river.
Alright minute by our standards but, fish are built to pick up the chemical change in their need for survival.

I would say Ray, given the right bait, the chemical change will travel far enough to draw barbel a long way upstream.

Only they can tell you how far, so I suggest you experiment

I have seen barbel rush upstream a good 20yards on pellets hitting the river surface, let alone sensing a chemical change.

 

[The bad one]

Bob here a tactic I've used on many rivers but first developed it on the Severn at Atcham. The fish in the area I fished were 30 yards down river in a thick bed of weed 15yards long. No way could you get a bait to them in that lot, let alone land a fish if you did.
At the time I was using maggot and hemp. I'd catapult small quantities of feed directly into the weed to stimulate them into feeding. Once I was confident they were feeding, I'd then feed small quantities shorter by 5-7 yards and so on until they came out into open water.

The whole process took about an hour to get them to come out of the weed. You also knew when they were out, as the fish could be seen flashing in the open water. I've used the same tactics when I've needed to, with many different baits down the years, on every river I've fished for barbel.

Lets call it "Walking the Bills to you!"

 

[klik2change]

a bait in the water may change the chemical buidup of all the water in the river.

Hi Fred,

I am sorry to take so long over this response. Unfortunately I had other things that had to be done immediately.

I accept that that some kinds of chemical change take place; bait companies have been making such claims for years. Hitherto I accepted that as a reasonable and plausible claim with regard to lakes. But a river is not a lake.

Even with a lake it must take some time, though it may be a very short time, for a flavour or scent to spread from the local point of entry. Baits are not energy - they are neither radioactive nor electrical so any effect they have will need time and a medium to spread. Water is the medium but what is the means of transfer, via the medium, to the rest of the lake?

Are you saying that some species of fish have a sense of smell so acute that a minute chemical change is detected by them as a sound, or a beam of light might be detected by human sensory equipment?

We know fish detect sound and other vibrations over long distances extremely quickly. Even for humans, sound travels faster underwater.

With a river, as you say yourself, the effect, whatever it is, is limited in its transfer upstream. I suggest it is almost certainly absent from upstream, because the water is moving all the time. Let's take the Trent, a river we both know. It has an immense flow rate so the water is gone, almost as soon as it arrives. There was a Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who said, according to Plato,

“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”

For Heraclitus, the river’s flow was a perfect example of his view that the only constant in the universe is change – so there!

Getting back to the baits and how fish become aware of them, could you point me at sources that support what you say, as I am genuinely interested?

One more point. I certainly do accept that fish will detect the arrival of pellets, as the sound vibrations [and the smell] are carried, in the water, downstream to them, from upstream, by the current. They then swim, upstream, to investigate.

But would fish swim downstream, [from upstream] having “heard” pellets chucked in twenty yards downstream of them?

 

[Fred Bonney]

I never said anything about smell?

Robert's query did relate to lureing fish from upstream, I'm suggesting flavours, or noise.
I have a theory and that is, the gills take in all the river, and any change within the water will be sensed, and if the flavour is right, it will attract them to the source.
I have no written evidence of this to point you to, it is based on my understanding that the "nostril" and the brain are not linked in our freshwater fish.

I would say that the lateral line will pick up any noise of pellets hitting the water,especially well, and before flavours.

I am a firm believer, that we must not credit fish with the same senses, or feelings come to that, as us humans.

 

[Robert Woods]

Phil,
Good idea mucker...treat barbel as River Dane chub. Just quietly feed them upstream for an hour, leaving rod out of water. Also this would get them feeding confidently....