Quest Baits Blog

I decided to put this piece together after reading the blog piece where Graham was catching chub on the new ‘chubby chops’ but was also missing plenty of bites. Graham was fishing the baits on a short hair.

One of many winter doubles that has fell to the boilie / bait band combination

The situation above closely mirrors that of one that I found myself in many winters ago whilst fishing on the Lower Severn below Worcester. I was fishing trimmed down boilies on a short hair and was getting lots of sharp pulls on the rod tip but only caught one barbel in the 8 hour session.

Now obviously there were plenty of barbel in the swim but the rig I was using wasn’t effective enough to catch them. The water was cold (around 6ºc) and because of this I was sure the barbel were not feeding properly but were merely picking the bait up in their lips without getting pricked by the hook (because of the hair being used).

Now I had caught a lot of good barbel through the Autumn on banded pellets.  This got me thinking of using the bands for the boilies as well, so that the bait was right next to the hook. This would mean that hopefully the barbel would not be able to mouth the bait without getting pricked by the hook. continue reading…

Pat Gillett explains why you’ll catch more Barbel if you listen to the information your rod tops are giving you;

A nice Upper Trent double caught after making a change

With more and more carp anglers trying their hand at barbel fishing, I see lots of anglers fishing behind 2 rods with bite alarms, as they would do in carp fishing, and paying more or less no attention at all to watching the rods.

This is all well and good but by doing this you really are missing out on a lot of vital information that your rod tops are telling you. The alarms will only really tell you when a fish has taken line off the spool, i.e. when they have hooked themselves. Now by carefully watching the rod tops you can tell so many more things;

1. Slow bend rounds…. maybe lots of weed gathering on line…do I need to increase my hook length? continue reading…

One of 3 doubles in an afternoon when we got the timing right !

Through one thing and another I have not been able to get out fishing much lately and so last weeks trip to the Warwickshire Avon was my first session for nearly three weeks.

The river was about a foot above normal level and carrying a nice brown tinge to it. My only concern was that we may be a day late, has the river had dropped at least 2 ½ feet from the previous day and there would be a good chance that the barbel had fed hard with the extra water on. This proved to be the case, as myself and my good mate Geoff struggled for one barbel each.

24.10.09

A recent session really brought home to me how much luck can play in the capture of a good fish. We all like to think that all the fish we catch are down to things like angling ability and top notch baits etc, but sometimes pure luck can play a large part in success.

My latest bit of good luck came on my first visit of the season to the Lower Severn. I was fishing has a guest on a Midlands region Barbel Catchers Club ‘fish in’, on a stretch of the river which I had never even seen before, let alone fished, so it would be a case of hoping for the best and waiting to see what, if anything came along.

We met up at about 12.30pm and were greeted with leaden skies and persistent rain. The river itself was really low with very little colour (as are all of the rivers at the moment), so it would probably be a ‘scratching’ type day. The only plus was that at least the river was flowing, as at times of very low water the Lower Severn can sometimes appear as still as a lake. continue reading…