A few things I want to say about the Trent.
I find it almost impossible to comprehend that there may be those who will deprecate this marvellous river now that it is giving excellent fishing to any who wants to learn it's secrets.
I am old enough to remember when the Trent was horribly polluted, when you knew you were getting near the Trent because of the smell. But a few of us stuck with it.
I didn't have much experience of the Trent when it was artificially warmed by the power stations and you could get an 8 oz roach a chuck because I was far away at the time. But I guess it was a matchman's dream, not so much my dream. But now the Trent is as near as it's possible to get to a natural English river. OK there are zander and maybe the odd catfish in it, which is a shame. But there are also some rather large pike.
But today The Trent is a great mixed fishery, it's even got a salmon run they tell me. In some areas there is great roach fishing. In others the chub fishing is superlative, my friend Lee has had a few big ones of late. And my friend Archie catches perch over 3 lbs regularly, even I get a few too.
And where would I go to get a 12 oz dace or a 10 lb river bream - well within a short drive of where I live?
The barbel are of course the river's predominant species. These days you can sit in most spots and average 5 to 6 fish from 4 lbs to 11 lbs in a short session. In a year you can easily catch 100 barbel, and you don't have to possess extraordinary skills to do so. In a typical 1 mile stretch of the Trent there are arguably more barbel than in all the rivers in the rest of England.
But is this bad?
To hear some talk, it's not proper barbel fishing. To hear some talk, barbel fishing is only proper when you are fishing for 3 fish in a Southern ditch, fish that were not even native to the water. Remember that other than the Thames and Kennet, barbel are not native to all the other southern rivers.
But the Trent is the barbel's true home. In the 1850s through to the early 1900s, barbel fishing on the Trent was conducted on a lavish scale. Swims were baited with thousands of lobworms and enormous numbers of barbel were slain, that's right - slaughtered, every weekend, right down as far as Gainsborough. It was nothing for a pair of anglers, the angler proper, and his "man", to get 150 barbel over two days. The fish were laid out in the yards of the various inns along the river and given to anyone who wanted them.
It's possible that the numbers of barbel are now similar to what they were in the Victorian period.
But why must we run down quality fishing like this. Must we wish that the river returned to the 70s and 80s when it was an almost barbel-less bacteriological artificially warmed soup that stinks of raw sewage?
