Hell,if our barbel looked like that they would be a very popular target.Nice stuff by the looks of it.
If you think that we have good yellowfish fishing, check out this link.
http://www.extremafishingspain.com/barbel.html
Makes me want to start saving.
May the fish be with you!!! www.seanmillsflyfishing.weebly.com
Hell,if our barbel looked like that they would be a very popular target.Nice stuff by the looks of it.
As they say in Spain....biggass fishas!!!
I'm not addicted to fishing, I can quit anytime my wife makes me!!
Yeah, the 'European' barbel are great fish - there are around a dozen species and I understand some of the Spanish species are monsters.
In the early and late 1960s I lived at Pangbourne and Goring on the Thames in England. Barbel were indigenous to the Thames (we only had the one species 'Barbus barbus') and conveniently we lived about half a mile from the best barbel stretch on the whole Thames. They do indeed look similar to our SM yellows. One main difference is they have an extra pair of feelers which will lead you to correctly assume they spend even more time bottom-feeding than do our yellows.
Where we were on the Thames the barbel frequented fast water with a gravelly bottom. They used to feed mainly on mussels, snails, shrimp, crayfish and sometimes even small fish like minnows. In the 'close' season they'd spawn in the shallows and we'd look over the bridge at thousands of fish up to around 10 or 12 pounds rolling and flashing their golden sides in the shallows. Come the 'open' season 16th June, the fish would retreat to the deeper faster water. We'd fish form them either legering with big lobworms or a couple of other slightly more refined techniques. If fishing with lobworms we'd chuck out into the mid-river fast-flowing deep (about 10/15 feet) 'swims' a ball of riverside clay filled with lobworms and other smaller worms as groundbait. It was hard fishing and often we only caught after the daytrippers and their boats had gone home.
The Thames is pretty muddy and big like the Vaal in the non-flyfishing sections so you will understand when I say we didn't flyfish for them. It simply wasn't practicable or efficient.
As lobworms weren't a 'natural' food for the fish - we used to get them landside by laying a wet sack on the watermeadow and the worms used to congregate underneath them. So I used to get freshwater mussels and as they were pretty flimsy on the hook I'd mix them and their juices into a bread dough. Awalnut-sized ball would prove a killer especially for bigger fish. I'd chuck in half a dozen small pellets as groundbait every now and then.
By far the most fun was on a summer's night to sneak onto our local weir at Whitchurch (Oxfordshire side of Pangbourne). Here we'd try to fish for the odd Thames brown trout or for chub or barbel. Using our Mark IV Avon split cane rods, we'd dap silkweed from the weir sill onto the frothing water just below the weir. The silkweed was crammed full of shrimp and other moogies. It was nail-biting stuff. Apart from the risk of having a severe 'Thames drift' you could hear massive barbel sucking in the weed with slurping noises. We got barbel upto about 10 lbs on this method. They also fight like hell but like a sort of cross muddie/yellow - they rip yards and yards of line off the reel but they hug the bottom.
They were introduced to some of the bigger English chalk streams a while back and they grow massive there. The waters there hold far more food for the barbel than does the Thames. With the water on these rivers like the Avon being gin-clear, there is also an opportunity for the flyfisher to catch the odd barbel using Czech-style nymphing in between trout and grayling, whilst fishing in wadable water. Some of my mates have caught barbel this way but I havn't yet tried that whenever I've been back on hols - yet....
The more you know, the less you need (Aboriginal Australian proverb)
Only dead fish swim with the stream (Malcolm Muggeridge)
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