Hamsphire Avon holiday cottage

I want to have a crack at chub, barbel and pike on the Hampshire Avon this Autumn (a bit like 'A Passion for Angling) and would like a cottage right on the river for four people for a few days as a base. Can anyone recommend a company that does that sort of thing. Anyone done it before? Any help gratefully received.
Matt

Here are acouple that you could try:

http://www.newforestcottages.com/farm_fishing.htm

http://www.stilwell.co.uk/show_town.asp?Q=hc|L4123861|P4356627

You can also try the new fishing cottage right on the banks at Britford as I think it is completed now.

Good luck.

Burgate might be a bit high up for a chance of barbel, good chub and roach up there though.

Rik is probably right although I have heard "stories" of Barbel being caught as high as Britford, but I have never witnessed any of these myself.

Apart from that I'd bow to Rik's superior local knowledge anytime.

Matt,

Spent 2 weeks at Burgate on the Avon myself this summer. If you want some info then drop me a private mail.

Cheers

Gary

I stayed here in August and its very handy for the Avon, being in Fordingbridge. Lovely and clean and the right price too have a look

here

there are barbel at East Mills and also at Sandy balls, although very few and far between nowadays, although they are big.
Get to Olly Cutts bit and they are non-existant, same at Castle hill, go to the Bat and Ball stretch and there are very few, but they do exist there.

Great chub all the way through mind, probably averaging 5lb a piece.

Rik,

There are a good few of decent size up on the Hale Syndicate at Downton as well.
The syndicate used to include the weir stream at the bottom end of the fishery, but sadly that went when the chap bought the mill house.

I think that Chris Yates has a small chapter on Barbel in the weir stream in one of his books. (Falling In Again?)

There are really good chub all the way up to the LAA fishery at Britford too.

What's the fishing like on the Hale syndicate Peter?
I've just secured some fishing at Downton on a stretch that was known as the 'Bull Hotel Downton', just at Moot Gardens.

Do you know it?

Rik,

I think that your section is just upstream of the Hale with starts at the wier above Downton bridge.

The fishing on the Hale can be excellent, although a lot depends on how much bait goes in there. Only 84 members in the syndicatye and the most I have ever seen on a day is 3 others, and we have 3 miles of both banks.

Really nice Chub (I've had them to 5lb 14ozs) some Barbel up to 11lbs (I think) the Dace are in shoals few and far between but average around 6/7 ozs with a good few around 12 to 14 ozs (ask Nigel
There are some lovely Carp (real carp shaped carp too) to low 20's with Grayling and the ocassional Roach as well.
Some wild and a few stocked Trout to boot.

I don't know your section, but I would be more than please to help you investigate it

Rik - why so few barbel in the stretches you mention? I have never fished there, but I have often stopped in the area and walked some of these stretches and the river seems ideal for them.

Is it a case of them never having been there, or is there another reason? After all, isn't this one of those "easy southern waters" Barney used to (still does) bang on about !?!

Stu,

I understand that these middle stretches never had the populations of barbel of the lower river so it may be a case of the fish never having populated these reaches in any number.After all the original Avon barbel came in through Christchurch Harbour from the Stour I believe.That said look at how barbel have populated the Trent & severn seemingly in all areas so I'm not sure how far that theory goes.

I am no Avon expert but it seems also the case that even the previously more prolific barbel stretches of the lower river such as Severals & Bisterne are producing less fish than they used to.The exception seems to be the Royalty which is perhaps distinguishable in the amount of feed that goes in & the fact that the fish are captive due to the Great Weir.

I dont know if any Avon regulars such as JP have any comment on this.

Stu - maybe they are not easy, but I did hook a 6lb+ chub within minutes of starting fishing there !!!!

and the following day came within touching distance of the biggest barbel I have seen in thirty plus years of angling.

Now that is tough......;o)

bang, bang, bang...

There have been some good little pockets of fish at places like East Mills and Burgate in the past but never in the sort of numbers that used to be in the river from below Ibsley weirpool and on down to Dudmoor.

I don't know where they've gone but barbel are becoming fairly scarce all through the previously well populated stretches.A good indicator is the number of anglers not fishing it, if you go back 10-15 years there were some swims which required you to be there at 8.00 in the morning to get in them, now you can fish those swims whenever you like, in fact many of them are never fished at all anymore.

The Barbel Catchers Club used to regularly fish on the day-ticket stretch at Winkton (now CAC) but you hardly ever see a soul on there these days.

I used to have four or five friends that would come down every year in the autumn for a week or sometimes two and now none of them bother.

Every angler, without exception, that I talk to on the bank is saying the same thing, there just aren't anything like the numbers of barbel that there used to be

It all adds up to there not being many barbel in the river, There have been some succesful spawnings in the last couple of years because I've seen barbel much smaller than the most recent stockings, but as to whether it will be enough to revive the river, I'm afraid I doubt that it will.

English Nature have said that we are no longer allowed to stock barbel in the Avon so there will be no more coming from that route, and the small ones which are there have to contend with dozens of Cormorants and also the Otters which are returning.

I'm thinking of taking up carp fishing, now that is easy.

A lot of the fish from Ibsley have migrated up river to the weir pools at Bicton, where they seem to have held station for the last few years, meaning the river below that syndicate stretch is fairly devoid of barbel.
Why they have done this, I have no idea.

As John says, it's pockets of fish.
The Severals is probably one of the most prolific stretches (other then the Royalty) and regular anglers (2 or 3 sessions a week) are taking about 15 barbel a season.

That's not a lot of fish in anybodies book.

Interesting if depressing points. I remember first fishing the Avon in the late eighties as a teenager & taking 8 barbel in a week which wasn't bad for an inexperienced angler.I've returned every year since & the number has fallen year on year to the extent that I dont really expect to get one at all now unless I go to the Royalty.I still love the river but is it now trading on past glories?

I wonder whether the amount of fish caught comes from the fact that less anglers now target the barbel & therefore less are caught?Certainly in the past you got lots of visting anglers simply because there wasn't barbel fishing locally.Now that's not the case, why travel? Do you think also that because the amount of bait isn't going in regularly the fish revert to more natural habits & move around more? The same amount of fish are present but they are not localised?

There are some healthy signs.I was at Bisterne on Sunday trotting all day.No big ones but a bite a cast later on from small chublets & dace which are probaly the year before last's spawning.

I haven't looked at the Avon much this year, but the silver fish are said to be very prolific.

Ringwoods recent match on the Severals was won with 15lb of dace, with back up weights in the low doubles.
All caught between 10am and 3pm on a hot sunny day.
That's lots of fish.

Maybe the river is returning to the numbers and types of fish it once had, or maybe it's rebalancing its own equilibrium.

Perhaps in 5 years time, we'll be seeing 30lb bags of dace and good catches of nettable roach.

Thats encouraging Rik, though I cant see the river ever returning to its halcyon days of the Capt Parker etc when without doubt it was the greatest coarse fishing river in the country.

Lets hope cormorant & otter predation doesn't takes its toll on some of the silver fish coming through.

Nigel , less anglers target the barbel now because they've got fed up with catching none for a week or two. One of my friends who used to come down regularly is a very competent angler but after his last two week session when he caught over 70 chub and not one single barbel he said " I can catch chub on the Lea and the Roding, I come down here to catch barbel." You've said yourself that your catches have gone down year on year, are you a worse angler now?

The bait stopped going in because the fish weren't there in the first place.
At one time in the fairly recent past when we caught more fish but access was more restricted, (the Somerley estate didn't allow us on until September 1st,) it never took too long to find the fish and put down a bed of bait, they would be feeding on it within minutes.

There are a lot of Dace in the river at the moment I've had a couple of short trotting sessions further down and caught dace every trot. Funnily enough I walked some of the Severals yesterday and talked to a guy who match fishes, he thought the weights in the recent match were very poor.I suppose with some chub thrown in they would have been alot higher.

(He also said he saw a BIG black cat at the top end of the Severals the day before if anyone is into that stuff.)

Why will they not allow stocking barbel ??

And Barney, you actually had to cast ? Normally they just jump in the net on arrival....

Was that the same holiday as the mullet you had? Certainly a nice brace !!