With the new river fishing season only a few days away, I found myself thinking about River Severn Barbel. When I was much younger, back in the 1970’s we had many family fishing trips to the River Severn at Arley to fish for Barbel.

Back then, the Severn was full of Barbel around the two to three pound mark, and catching a few of them wasn’t hard at all. The two favourite methods, at least among my group, was the block-end feeder with maggots, and legering with a single fairly large cube of luncheon meat.

Tactics were simple - put on a heavy lead or swimfeeder, cast it out into the river (very fast at Arley so a lot of weight was needed to hold bottom), put the rod in a rest pointing fairly high up, and wait for a Barbel to hook itself, which was indicated by our somewhat under-powered rods bending violently and almost being pulled off the rest.

Playing the fish usually involved winding in when the fish was coming towards you, then furiously back-winding as it went past and winding again when it turned and came back the other way again. Even though the Barbel were not huge by today’s standards, they seemed to have no trouble swimming fast against the current, and you basically repeated the above process as the fish got gradually nearer to your bank as it tired.

Eventually the Barbel was tired enough to be beached (we couldn’t afford landing nets) and could be admired for a short while before being returned to the river to swim off.

Its been quite a few years since I fished the Severn, and I think this will be the year when I finally make the pilgrimage back to Arley to again do battle with River Severn Barbel.

This time I will try to be better equipped with a decent Barbel rod so if I connect with one of the better specimens at least I might feel half in control while I’m playing it. There are some really nice specialist Barbel rods to be had these days, and there’s usually a good selection of them on eBay, so thats where I’ll look first. I’d better get some heavy swimfeeders and some decent hooks too - I’ve had quite small Barbel straighten hooks before now, even forged ones.

It will be interesting to see how much it has changed. I expect the river will seem smaller than I remember, but hopefully the Barbel will seeem bigger, and whatever happens, I’m sure it will be nice, just to be there.