Trent Barbel, Bawburgh Tench - Darryn Stolworthy

This entry was posted on 26th September, 2016

I thought I'd give you a bit of background about how I got into fishing and what I've been up to over the years to get to where I am now. However, I’ve been angling for 40 years – that’s an awful lot of fishing to talk through and would take far too long for one blog post! For now, I'll let you know what I've been up to this last month.

I don't really do too much fishing in August, as work is normally peaking into early September, but I did have an invite to fish the tidal Trent for barbel on a 48hr trip. I had never fished it before so I gave a quick call to Stewart Downing who brought me up to speed on what to expect!

I arrived on the Friday evening after a 2 ½ hour drive from work and got shown to the stretch we were going to fish. My first impression was that there didn't seem to be much to fish to. Once past the boulders there seemed to be an 8ft run which dropped into 12ft further out, so I put a rod on each of these lines along with a couple of pints of pellets and a few of the boilies I was using for hook baits. My rigs were a simple running lead with a 5oz lead and a 3-4ft braided hooklink to a size eight wide gape hook on both rods. This type of tidal barbel fishing was all new to me. I did a bit on the Wensum when there was a few about but two rods up in the air on Delkims was the norm up here!

When the bite came, crikey the rod literally buried. I picked it up and found myself attached to one angry fish. Eventually I got it in the net, I have to say thanks to my friend David for his assistance here, and it looked like a good fish. On the scales it went to 12.3lbs, I took a few pictures and popped it back!

The next day passed uneventfully, apart from some pretty big boats speeding through my swim, until early evening when, out of the blue, the same left hand rod was away again. I landed what was a smaller fish at 6lb but it still went like the clappers! I was expecting some action in the dark but that was it until 1am when the same rod was away again. After a decent fight I had another nice fish in the net, 9.6lb, and as I was returning it the other rod was away. After a brief battle another barbel of about 6lb was in the net!



There was no more action that night, but I had a great time and will be heading back soon.

The week after I did a 24 hour session after some tench, fishing on Lodge Farm Lake at Bawburgh. I turned up in the late afternoon and had a quick lead around. It turned out that the weed that was quite thick in the spring seemed to have died back rather quickly thanks to summer floods!

I baited an area about 45yrds out, next to one of these dead weedbeds, in 9ft of water with a lovely clean bottom. My feed was mainly red maggot, corn, and pellet with a few boilies. I was fishing three rods, of which one was on a maggot feeder and the other two were on the method – both with a small yellow pop up boilie. All three rods were cast to the same area about 6ft apart, but the right hand rod was the closet to the weedbed.



It was about 11.30 and I had just made a cuppa (could have been a beer) and the right hand rod was away – one of the method rods! After a good fight there was a lovely 7lb tench in the net, so I took a quick picture and before popping it back. After clipping up, I put the rod out again to roughly the same spot and went back to my tea! About half hour later same rod was away again and in the net was another tench, 6lb this time. Despite that little spell of feeding I thought I was on for a few more but that was it until I packed up early afternoon.

Until next time!