Leaving home around 7.30 p.m. on a mild grey day, prospects looked reasonably promising. I knew it couldn’t last, but was secretly hoping the weathermen had got it wrong. But I wasn’t going to vocalise those thoughts in case the ‘Weather Gods’ heard me. I was on the bank just before 9 a.m., and not…

The year started for me at Clawford Vineyard on the 1st January after a rather hectic Millennium party. It was naturally a rather shaky late start but by midday I found myself fishing Fletchers lake in front of the accommodation.My approach was to lightly feed a swim in front of the reeds with a mixture…

Just a couple of trips to report on: One was a day on the Kennet with my good friend Alan (spit) Tomkins, roach king of the lowlands and Edward ‘the Obscured’ Adcock. It was a day when the floodwaters were at their height and I fully expected the river to be a mile wide. No….

As ever, cricket, or to be more accurate, my eldest son’s cricket, has dominated my summer, and I’ve hardly been fishing at all. What started as a fun flirtation with sea-fishing at Brighton marina in the coarse close season slowly developed into an interest in that side of the sport, and more especially, into an…

For such trips I particularly favour a roving approach. Pockets are filled with tackle and a bait smock is stuffed with maggots and maybe a few slices of bread and some other baits. I go armed with a 14′ match rod and centre pin and the only other thing I have to carry is a…

Robert Johnson of Washington State sent me an E-mail recently saying how he enjoyed my recent feature on fly fishing for carp, having seen the pictures of the twenty pounders he is intending to try the method himself. As Robert said “We have millions of big carp in the Columbia river and its backwaters”. Having…

On page 66, at the start of the Autumn section of ‘Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing’, Peter is taken Barbel fishing by his father. Their chosen tactic is to trot a seven foot glide with 4 gentles (maggots to you and me !) on a No.9 hook to 3X gut. This is presented below a ‘big…

Pick Your Spot – With Care It’s very tempting to stick with what you know but this is something I have always found very hard to do. Every season I like to spend some time searching out new waters, most of them turn out to be duck eggs but now and again this approach turns…

Through the 1960’s almost up to the present time there have been three main approaches to catching barbel in terms of bait. One is to preoccupy them by using large quantities of small food items, such as maggots, casters, hemp, corn or small pieces of meat. Another is the big bait approach, using for example,…

As August turned to September and the nights began to draw in, my son, Joe and I went in search of new swims where we might catch that PB barbel. Last month I described a number of swims we had fished where I expected there to be barbel and we were not disappointed. All of…