Instead, I lay in bed till 8

A couple of pals had called me to join them on an overnight/ all-day trip but I couldn’t make the night session as Maggi and I had tickets to a concert. Instead, I lay in bed till 8.30am when the phone rang. It was the boys. They wanted to know when I was arriving and could I bring down some hot drinks because they were freezing! Well, of course I did. I arrived to find them a little down at mouth, having been caught out by the first really cold snap of the autumn. Dressed in tee-shirts and light clothing, they had had little, if any, sleep and had quit fishing at about 11pm because of the cold. Instead they had tried to avoid it by sheltering in the car, to little avail.I arrived, bright and chirpy around 10am and settled down to get some serious fishing in. Being the late arrival, and the prime swims having been taken by my friends, I set up some distance downstream of their cozy camp and put a leger out on one rod whilst setting up a float rod and centre-pin. I gave it an hour or two, and had a one or two small chub, dace and gudgeon on the float but nothing on the leger. As it was so bright, I was fishing the deeper water with the lead, hoping to find a barbel in the shaded area under the trees. The swim was a bit tight too, with little room to get a decent trot down on the float, but I persevered until the guys came up to announce that they were off to find some lunch. That was when I moved a little upstream.I can only imagine that either the beer was off or the food really bad, because they were back within the hour, just in time to witness my barbel rod nose-dive downstream. It still amazes me the manner in which these bites come. One second, all is peace and calm, the next, bedlam. If it were not for the John Roberts butt-grips I use, I would have lost rod after rod by now. (A friend of mine bought some JR copies once, the plastic was far too rigid and it snapped. His rod is now somewhere downstream of Penton Hook. So beware. Buy the originals, they last a lifetime). That massive bite developed into a fight to match, my old quivertip rod was almost performing a circle at times. At last, I drew it over the net and it was all over. A beautiful golden barbel, weighing in at 9lb 5 ozs .I was trying out some new baits. Not because I had no confidence in my old ones but because my sandwiches were horrible. So I saved my bait and used them instead! Cheese paste rolled in hempseed produced a missed bite which could have been another barbel and smoked salmon produced a couple of little chublets. Then another thumping bite on the cheese/hemp mixture saw me into another barbel. This one pulled the needle around to 5lb 8ozs.I spent the rest of the afternoon upstream, long-trotting in swims that I normally ledger in. It was well worthwhile. I found out more about those swims in a couple of hours by running a float though them than I had in the whole of last season, when I fished them with a leger. It was great fun too, catching a few dace, chub and gudgeon, never knowing if the next bite would produce a barbel. But it didn’t. Never mind, I can honestly say that I enjoyed catching those tiddlers on the float just as much as I had enjoyed wrestling with the big barbel earlier.We packed up as the light began to fail, even though this was the time most likely to produce a few barbel. The guys were wrecked. Their whole session was ruined by not being prepared for the cold previous night. Whilst I was having fun catching fish, they were not. The intense cold had sapped their reserves and it seemed that they were just going though the motions, waiting to go home and get to bed. This is unusual as normally it’s me who is the one totally unprepared. And these guys are very good anglers too, one of them far better than I shall ever be. Whilst their extra hours on the bank had put them at a disadvantage, those same extra hours in bed had put fish on the bank for me. I guess we all learned something that day. And what a great excuse for me to stay in bed in future!

Geoff Maynard