First barbel, first double.

After my opening day chub catch, I was keen to get a barbel on the bank. Saturday saw me tackle a rapidly receding, albeit moody lower Severn. Several hours of nothing proved it to be a bad call as far as the fishing was concerned.

That was meant to be it until the the middle of the week. However, a family walk along the Warks Avon on Sunday changed all that. On seeing the river I couldn't help but feel it was worth a go. Although only a few inches above normal, it had a good colour and looked very promising. I made my first cast at about 7.15 that evening. By now it had started to rain. I had two rods with me baited with boilie and meat on the upstream and downstream respectively. I had used a dropper to deposit some bait on the upstream spot with a much smaller quantity downstream. I'm convinced Avon barbel spook when presented with beds of bait so I like to put a bed upstream to pull fish in but make sure a bait is presented further away to pick up wary fish. It has worked a lot in the last 18 months or so to convince me there's something in it.

I was feeling very confident and a few early taps helped keep optimism high. But as the time passed by I was unable to get a bite worth striking at. I kept bait going in via the dropper on hourly intervals as well as PVA bags and tried to keep the faith as I was certain the swim was holding fish. I decided

Not the barbel I had hoped for

to swap the boilie for two halibut pellets. No sooner had it hit the deck when the upstream rod starting bouncing and a fish was hooked. However, there were no screaming runs as a bream of 4lb+ appeared from the gloomy depths. In all this time the meat rod had been motionless. Not even a tremor, tap or twitch. As 10pm approached, time was quickly running out. Then out of the blue, a rod wrenching bite on the meat had the rod leaping from the rests. There was no mistake what the culprit was as my first barbel of the season was on. Staying deep, it made several powerful runs. A few glimpses showed a good fish. On seeing it in the net it looked even better. It was a perfect specimen and a long fish too. The scales revealed 10lb 6oz. Not only had I landed my first barbel of the season, it was a double too. With about 20 minutes of the session left, I recast in hope more than expectation but with the persistent rain came a very gloomy evening so I departed very muddy but more than satisfied with my efforts.

A great double to kick the 2016 season off