Can you be a keen angler but not go fishing ?

[The bad one]

I concur with the size being stated for Southern French rivers. 10k drift in a canoe and the biggest fish I saw was around 7 lb in gin clear water. If you did 10k on the Ribble, Severn, if they were ever that clear, you'd pass over at least one double per Km. Why it should be that French barbel don't get to the size they do in the UK, I haven't got a scooby doo!
Anybody who lives there want a stab at it?

 

[sam vimes]

I concur with the size being stated for Southern French rivers. 10k drift in a canoe and the biggest fish I saw was around 7 lb in gin clear water. If you did 10k on the Ribble, Severn, if they were ever that clear, you'd pass over at least one double per Km. Why it should be that French barbel don't get to the size they do in the UK, I haven't got a scooby doo!
Anybody who lives there want a stab at it?

Might it have something to do with water temperatures and rivers rising in highland areas? The reality for the UK is that the rivers with the biggest barbel are those that rise in (relatively) lowland catchments (Thames, Trent, Ouse, Southern chalk streams etc. The rivers that rise in more upland areas tend to have barbel that are usually distinctly smaller. The French highlands are quite a bit higher than any of our barbel rivers originate from. I suspect the rivers that originate in the Alps are likely to be colder for longer than any of our rivers. I'm sure there will be other factors at play too, but winter water temperatures must have a part to play.

 

[@Clive]

Remember that the UK benefits from the effects of the Gulf Stream so anywhere in Europe on the same latitude as anywhere in the UK will have a colder climate. The point about the mountain streams feeding the bigger French rivers raises some interesting points. Both my local rivers are a few miles longer than the Severn.

The Charente rises near here at an altitude of 295 metres, only 20 metres more than the Trent. There are two dams side by side that feed it within the first 10km. After around 80km it becomes a chalk stream in that it runs through limestone country with many deep aquifers feeding into it. That continues for around 100km before it becomes a lowland sedentary drain like the Gt. Ouse. Its estuary is muddy with a low tidal surge. The middle reaches are pure Mr. Cabtree with weirs, gravel shallows, deep boat channels and a very healthy weed growth. The water clarity in the warmer months is crystal and the water temperature in the middle reaches in winter is at least two to three degrees C higher than the Vienne. Carp grow to over 60lb and catfish well over the 'ton'. But the heaviest barbel that I have seen / caught was just over 9lb.

The Vienne rises much higher at 880 metres and unlike the Charente has some large dams in the middle section. Both rivers have many weirs. Each pound, that is the stretch between weirs can be anything from 300 metres to over 10 kilometres and can be regarded as seperate fisheries. The Vienne is not navigable and has little depth in most of the middle reaches, but spreads over 100m wide with many rocks, islands and shallow, weedy areas. Anything much over a metre deep with flow is hard to find. The larger barbel are mainly confined to deep channels. However I have very recently spotted some larger fish regularly resting in a foot or so of water under tree canopy. There are carp to over 50lb, catfish over the 'ton' but the largest barbel that I have seen / caught were also just over 9lb, both from seperate areas of the river. The Vienne enters the Loire, the largest river in France that has a stretch between the lowest weir and the sea of well over 200km and runs over gravel and sand. The Loire is known for its massive shoals of small barbel.

The biggest known barbel captures seem to come from the Rhone and Seine systems. There are rumours of double figure fish in a salmon river in Brittany and a few rumours of much larger than average fish in some of the former salmon rivers that are fed from the Pyrenees. I haven't been able to firm anything up yet.

Quite why the barbel peak at around 9lb is a mystery to me. What I have noticed is that fish of 6lb or more are usually solitary. I often see them wandering in some strange places, shallow areas well away from classic barbel swims. You cannot target the larger ones like you would in the English rivers (excluding the tidal ones) such as under tree roots on the outside of bends because usually catfish reside in these areas. And that might be the answer to the conundrum. Too many bl**dy catfish!

 

[steve2]

Remember that the UK benefits from the effects of the Gulf Stream so anywhere in Europe on the same latitude as anywhere in the UK will have a colder climate. The point about the mountain streams feeding the bigger French rivers raises some interesting points. Both my local rivers are a few miles longer than the Severn.

The Charente rises near here at an altitude of 295 metres, only 20 metres more than the Trent. There are two dams side by side that feed it within the first 10km. After around 80km it becomes a chalk stream in that it runs through limestone country with many deep aquifers feeding into it. That continues for around 100km before it becomes a lowland sedentary drain like the Gt. Ouse. Its estuary is muddy with a low tidal surge. The middle reaches are pure Mr. Cabtree with weirs, gravel shallows, deep boat channels and a very healthy weed growth. The water clarity in the warmer months is crystal and the water temperature in the middle reaches in winter is at least two to three degrees C higher than the Vienne. Carp grow to over 60lb and catfish well over the 'ton'. But the heaviest barbel that I have seen / caught was just over 9lb.

The Vienne rises much higher at 880 metres and unlike the Charente has some large dams in the middle section. Both rivers have many weirs. Each pound, that is the stretch between weirs can be anything from 300 metres to over 10 kilometres and can be regarded as seperate fisheries. The Vienne is not navigable and has little depth in most of the middle reaches, but spreads over 100m wide with many rocks, islands and shallow, weedy areas. Anything much over a metre deep with flow is hard to find. The larger barbel are mainly confined to deep channels. However I have very recently spotted some larger fish regularly resting in a foot or so of water under tree canopy. There are carp to over 50lb, catfish over the 'ton' but the largest barbel that I have seen / caught were also just over 9lb, both from seperate areas of the river. The Vienne enters the Loire, the largest river in France that has a stretch between the lowest weir and the sea of well over 200km and runs over gravel and sand. The Loire is known for its massive shoals of small barbel.

The biggest known barbel captures seem to come from the Rhone and Seine systems. There are rumours of double figure fish in a salmon river in Brittany and a few rumours of much larger than average fish in some of the former salmon rivers that are fed from the Pyrenees. I haven't been able to firm anything up yet.

Quite why the barbel peak at around 9lb is a mystery to me. What I have noticed is that fish of 6lb or more are usually solitary. I often see them wandering in some strange places, shallow areas well away from classic barbel swims. You cannot target the larger ones like you would in the English rivers (excluding the tidal ones) such as under tree roots on the outside of bends because usually catfish reside in these areas. And that might be the answer to the conundrum. Too many bl**dy catfish!

One thing to remember when it comes To big fish in the UK is the amount of repeat capture that give a false impression of the number of fish.
Also on many rivers there are vast
amounts of feeding with bait taking place.

 

[@Clive]

One thing to remember when it comes To big fish in the UK is the amount of repeat capture that give a false impression of the number of fish.
Also on many rivers there are vast
amounts of feeding with bait taking place.

It isn't that.

The River Dearne is less than 40 miles long. In one 2 mile stretch there were at least 15 double figure barbel. I think the largest caught was over 16lb. It was very lightly fished. The Don and Rother, small rivers, also hold many double figure barbel and again, lightly fished in many areas. The Charente is like a cross between the Thames in looks and Hampshire Avon in water quality, is bigger than both, yet does not appear to have any doubles.

 

[Philip]

My guess is that its probably a combination of factors with high stock levels playing a part, basically there are a lot of fish & a lot of mouths to feed so an element of stunting happens. The level of predation is also high, as Clive mentioned Catfish are all over the place so any Barbel that does make 10lb is probably a lucky fish to have not already been chomped. Carp on the other hand can almost outgrow being a target for anything but the biggest Cat but Barbel don’t have that luxury and even a Barbel between 5 and 10 pound is going to be fair game.

In some of the warmer southern rivers fish may also spawn several times which can impact the size of the bigger females and I also think less angler baits could play a part in some specific situations.

I don’t think its any coincidence that the places I know where the average size is high are also the ones with a lower stock.

 

[@Clive]

Location is definitely the key. I met a German angler who lived and fished in France. He had caught more than 400 barbel and not had one over 3lb. He was simply fishing in the wrong places

I can stand on a bridge over a small tributary of the Vienne and watch hundreds of fingerling barbel feeding on a gravel run. Further down the river I catch last year's hatchlings at around 9". The shoal makes its way upstream feeding on the sandy river bed then they all turn sideways, drift downstream and do it all over again. Just below the confluence the average size is just under 2lb. Each shoal has less numbers the larger the individual members are. Up to 2021 I basically fished for large barbel probably 80% of my fishing time. I rarely caught one under 4lb and two fish was a good result. That demonstrates the pyramidial structure of barbel in the rivers that I fish. If I got a 7lb fish I would move swims if feasible because the chances of getting another over 6lb from the same spot were negligable based on the number of times that I had fished. .

I still harbour a desire to land a 10lb barbel over here, but these days I do more mixed fishing for other species and only have sessions after the bigger ones a few times a year. By scaling down my tackle I can enjoy the 3lb and 4lb barbel amongst the bream, roach, rudd and carassins whereas before I would simply be fishing for one fish and more often than not, failing to catch it.

 

[Alan Whitty]

Barbel in the UK, specifically South of the Trent don't have the numbers anymore so fish get larger, but rarer, I've fished in Christchurch this week on meat, boilie, pellet etc in conditions that would have been thought to be favourable, not a bite, the Stour here has been fished quite heavily as the stretch is the place to go in higher water conditions, two barbel have been caught, three chub and one bream, that equates to lots of blanks, the Gt.Ouse these days is a blankers paradise and certainly isn't a place to go if you want a barbel, the Thames is similar, with monsters being caught without the angling public knowing how many blanks there are in pursuit of one...

 

[John Aston]

Full circle then. As a kid in the Sixties , only the Hants Avon was really noted for barbel . The Trent was a long way from its resurgence , and if memory serves neither the Severn or Wye had started producing them in numbers (I think Severn stocked in late 50s ?), or at all . They were rumoured in some other rivers like the Great Ouse but Yorkshire did (and does) have barbel in the Ouse system .

But how times change. Some anglers will airily dismiss a nine pounder as a nice fish but nothing special - and yet in the 80s my mate got half a page in the Anglers' Mail with an Avon fish - of 9-1 . It took me years to get a Yorkshire fish of over 8 .

Sadly , barbel have become the new carp and even on a small river like the Swale, 'anglers' are virtually laying siege to them on some stretches - 24/7 fishing , multi rods and often ten swims in line being hammered . Not for me thanks .

 

[@Clive]

There were doubles being caught in the Yorkshire rivers in the 70's and 80's. The Wharfe around Collingham and Tadcaster and the Nidd near Tockwith for example. Back then information was a lot harder to come by.

 

[John Aston]

The very odd one, agreed, but the average Yorkshire barbel in my group of mates was perhaps 5 pounds and nobody I know had a double until the nineties in Yorkshire . Can't say the excitement of the fight is any different really - we just use much heavier tackle now than the 1.5 TC Avon and 8lb Maxima of yore

 

[@Clive]

There is or was a pool near Boston Spa with a gantry that carried a water pipe leading to a factory. That held at least two fish over 10lb. The deep far bank channel at Collingham adjoining the golf course was another location. Good for fly-fishing for grayling in winter too. Then I had access to a private unfished stretch of the Nidd near to Tockwith because of my shooting connections. That had a bank with a sharp outside bend where I had an 11lb barbel. The first one that I was told about by a customer who fished for barbel using disgustingly matured gorgonzola. The others I stumbled upon.

Tackle of choice cum necessity was an Ernest Stamford ledger rod and Mitchell 300 reel.

 

[nottskev]

It might be splitting hairs, but I wouldn't say barbel are the new carp; it's more that some barbel anglers are the new carp anglers, and even that's probably unfair to those carp anglers who fish with flexible ingenuity. Barbel remain barbel, and you don't have to join the midnight floodbank car park and tented village to catch them. It's great to have good barbel fishing in the region, but nobody's obliged to get fixated on doubles, and I've caught them on every method except carbelling, float, leger, free-lining and pole included. I last weighed one three years ago because it looked suspiciously big, but my scales batteries ran out long since.

Barbel distribution is not only a north/south thing. Of the five rivers I can call reasonably local, only one has lots of barbel, and these are localised to the lower middle and tidal of a very long river. Neither the tributaries that drain the Peak District nor the lowland ones offer much viable barbel fishing and that's been the case for a long time. Along with a fishing friend, I recently stumbled on a video where an angler night-fishing one of these trib's caught barbel of 7, 12 and 15 lbs - an outstanding and well-deserved catch. The 7lb-er was the exciting fish, we agreed. When there are only doubles left in your river, you've got problems.

I like the French situation as reported by Clive and Steve. Plenty of barbel - and other species - and license to roam in all kinds of romantic, picturesque and lightly-fished rivers. Who cares if the barbel seem to top out at "only" 9lbs? What kind of "only" is that? It's said that where I fish for them these days, one barbel in four is a double. But I don't enjoy it any more or less than when I first caught three and four pound barbel on the Severn in the 70's. Or fish of 5 or 6 pounds on the Dane in the 90's. Or, at the start of a short-lived barbel boom in the 00's, dozens of 1 -2lb barbel per session on the Welsh Dee.

 

[sam vimes]

I know quite a few competent, regular anglers who have gone to their graves without ever having a Swale double. These days, if I was looking to catch one, I wouldn't even bother trying above Topcliffe Weir. IIRC, I've had three doubles from the Swale (two below TW, one above). The best of them was 11lb 2oz. I've never been lucky enough to witness a Swale barbel caught that exceeded that by more than a few ounces.

 

[@Clive]

The thing is Kev that before I got to France I read reports of barbel exceeding 10kg having been caught on my two local rivers. That is 22lb in old money. The reality however is very different.

I like to set myself targets and so armed with the information about 20lb barbel that is naturally where my fishing sessions lead me. I used google earth to locate suitable areas and my work travels to visit them. We are talking about swims located over 60 miles of river on each of two rivers. Tackle was used that could stop a big fish in snaggy swims. Virtually everywhere is overgrown. No manicured swims out here. Often access to the best swims is not possible for a variety of reasons. Fishing swims that back home would give every chance of a double often resulted in a blank or at best a fish of around 7lb. In that time carp to 30lb and more and catfish up to 60lb were stopped using my barbel tackle. Eventually I got one of 9lb 2oz in a swim close to home. But it had taken me five years of specialising to get that fish. A year or so later I found a suitable swim while cycling along the river bank when on holiday. I didn't have a heavy enough lead to hold bottom so did not expect to fish it that holiday. Next morning while having breakfast at a picnic table I spotted a 60g lead laying on the floor. That afternoon I had a 9lb 3oz barbel using my holiday tackle of a travel rod and eight quid Crivit reel. At the end of 2021 I got another 9lb 2oz barbel from a swim in the area where I had read about the 10kg barbel. That made me think that perhaps somebody was confusing their lbs and kgs.

Catching 4lb barbel is fun when using an old cane Avon and centrepin. But, as I keep finding out, the large carp and catfish that inhabit these rivers are unstoppable on such gear. So, you have the conundrum of fishing with something that will stop the larger barbel and give you a chance against the zoo creatures or put up with the breakages when you encounter them. In October and spring the zoo creatures seem particularly active. So in those periods I step up the gear accordingly. Last month I got wiped out by one that took a single grain of sweetcorn minutes after I had put the big rod and large pellet bait away. Twice this month I have been unable to stop fish whilst using a salmon / pike rod and matching line, etc. If I ever catch the damned thing I will re-home it in the woodland behind the swim

#Steve Arnold has similar decisions to make. His swims by necessity are mostly 50 to 80 metre casts into deep, flowing water. There are a lot of carp of fifty pounds or more and the ever present catfish. It isn't much fun winding in 3lb barbel all day on the sort of gear that he needs to deliver the bait to the fish.

 

[markcw]

Barbel in the UK, specifically South of the Trent don't have the numbers anymore so fish get larger, but rarer, I've fished in Christchurch this week on meat, boilie, pellet etc in conditions that would have been thought to be favourable, not a bite, the Stour here has been fished quite heavily as the stretch is the place to go in higher water conditions, two barbel have been caught, three chub and one bream, that equates to lots of blanks, the Gt.Ouse these days is a blankers paradise and certainly isn't a place to go if you want a barbel, the Thames is similar, with monsters being caught without the angling public knowing how many blanks there are in pursuit of one...

A 16,lb one was caught at Sandford weir on the back channel ot the Thames last year, it wasn't publicised .

 

[spoonminnow]

not applicable

 

[Alan Whitty]

A 16,lb one was caught at Sandford weir on the back channel ot the Thames last year, it wasn't publicised .

Several 18's have been caught from the Thames around Oxford in the last five years, however I wish you well in catching barbel consistently in that area, its a labour of love and very, very challenging....

 

[@Clive]

Earlier this year we bumped into a friend who we haven't seen for a while since we moved house. She said that her husband Wilf was due to have a hernia operation and had bought a Carte de Peche as he was hoping to spend some of his recovery period fishing. He hadn't been for a number of years. I offered to take him and set him up in a good swim where he would be comfortable. Time passed and we heard nothing from them. Then a couple of months ago I bumped into her again. Wilf had suffered complications to the hernia repair and was still unable to fish. She said that he was dead keen to go but didn't feel able. Since then I have phoned him regularly to set up a date to go. In the last three months he has had the hernia repair op', covid, bronchitis, we've had a month of rain and floods and is now hospitalised with pulmonary issues. And in England their son-in-law who has motor nurone disease is not expected to last the week out. So, even if Wilf gets out of hospital they will have to go to see their daughter. And they are booked to spend two months in Portugal after Christmas.

I spoke to Lesley yesterday. She says that Wilf is still keen to go fishing and talks about it all the time. So, I guess that answers the question.

 

[seth49]

I must admit that I used to fish in any weather, but now I’ve got to 74, I must admit I pick my days now, if it’s raining or cold I’ll just give it a miss nowadays.