- Joined
- Jul 12, 2009
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- 9,335
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I had an unexpected trotting session for the latter part of the afternoon today :cheesy grin: . I spooled up a Gary Mills FJTaylor pin up with 6lb sensor and left the lineguard attatched. The session turned out to be action packed, ok no big stuff but lots of feisty chub up to about three pounds. They where all well schooled in how to shed a hook in bankside vegatation and in how to make crazy all out dashes to get into any snags to do it...barstewards lol. I was in amongst a shoal of chub and getting a fish or loosing one on virtually every trott. As the action went on the fish seemed to be dropping further downstream and so I was having to trott further before the float was pulled under. Anyhow on one trott the float was about 45 / 50 yds down stream before doing a dissapearing act and I struck into what felt like a new uk record chub lol . Thinking it was a chub for the first few seconds I put on a lot of pressure to try and keep it out of the bankside vegatation but it didn't try to get into it and just kept pulling back so I kenw it wasn't a chub. I had to climb the steep banking asap and manouvre my way through the undergrowth along the bank whilst having to keep the line tight to the fish plus carry the landing net, another pair of hands would have been handy :roll: . Anyhow I got down the bank pretty near to where the fish was hugging bottom which by now I was certain it was a barbel . This was unusual for this time of year and especially for this river (this was only my 4th barbel in here in 8yrs) so I was very pleased. After about 5min's of tug of war the fish slid over the net and what a lovely little barbel it was, it was in tip top fettle, a couple of pic's of it....
Just for reference, the bickerdyke line guard didn't inhibit wallise casting at all.
Just for reference, the bickerdyke line guard didn't inhibit wallise casting at all.