Wye fishing holiday

I have just returned from a 7 day holiday in mid'ish wales with free fishing on a 700 yard stretch of the wye that is about 100 yards from the accommodation.

Here is a link to the place Boatside, Aberedw |

Basically there are lodges, a "cider mill", camping and caravanning. For the 'vans and campers there is a shower block and I assume toilets.

The owners are very pleasant and we had the "edw lodge" and found it very comfortable.

I had 7 chub to 5lb and a barbel between 6 and 7lb. No barbel have been caught in the last 11 years on this stretch but this was the 3rd to come out in a fortnight.

All the fish where caught last saturday evening and sunday afternoon. The river rose and coloured up making it impossible to fish with the limited tackle I had taken with me.

Friends and I have been fishing the Hay-on-Wye area a lot this season, we catch barbel just about every evening, and sometimes quite a few, with a good percentage of doubles. My pal is fishing there now; yesterday evening he had 5 barbel as the river flooded up. It's been raining hard there the last few days.
I'm told by the local experts that the barbel thin right out above Builth Wells - the area you were fishing - so you have to fish downriver from there to find the more prolific barbel fishing. Beautiful area though eh?

geoff....i think i fished your bit the other week,

enjoyed it and will be back i think......but whats your take on that area/stretch of the river?

perhaps too gamey?.....one step too far for numbers....

I'm a new boy, so probably not the best source. It seems, from talking to the locals, that there is a reasonably good head of barbel all the way upstream to Builth but they stop about there.
Numbers? Hmmm. All relative I s'pose. Further downstream in the Hay (our) area we are fishing evening sessions, usually catching good quality barbel of a larger than average stamp for the Wye. A 9 or 10lb fish is fairly common on our stretch. I'm told this is a bigger stamp of fish than on the lower and middle river beats but that the lower beats can produce big quantities of fish in a session. It's rare that anyone on our bit gets more than about 7 or 8 barbel in an evening session (say 4 hours). We were getting plagued with chub last month - 100lb+ bags in a session, could only fish one rod! - but the last couple of weeks they've vanished and every bite is a barbel. Weird.
My own experience on the Wye (which so far is restricted to just a couple of fisheries on the middle wye above Hereford and our bit near Hay) is that if you can land on the fish then you'll catch them, but you can also go hundreds of feet and find no fish at all! Amazing really that a river which looks like one big barbel swim can be apparently totally devoid of of fish for huge stretches. Then when you start getting bites it's a fish a chuck, sometimes for hours!
There's a lot to learn on this river; every visit the river is a different height, speed and colour. What I learned on the last trip needs revising on the next. Give me a few years and I'll probably crack it!

As you say the barbel was unexpected up near builth.

I normally fish club lakes/pits and have no idea about river fishing nor do I have heavy feeders or weights for holding bottom in strong flows but I do have floats so I thought that's what I'll take, then I ended up throwing in a couple of small feeders (15 gram cage) just in case.

The river was much wider than I expected and the only flow was about 30 yards out. The first evening I tried "trotting" but with the distance I could cast it was like fishing a lake, no flow at all and in fact with the wind blowing up stream any float movement I had was against the flow.

After an hour with no bites I changed to a 15 gram cage feeder stuffed with ground pellet and a banded 8mm pellet and cast into the flow. Recast every five minutes. Success.

This produced good fishing saturday and sunday and lots of bites monday through wednesday bite I didn't hook any more. Thursday the river was up fair and well coloured, I couldn't hold bottom with the feeders I had. Friday was bvgger wet and I didn't go fishing.