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since this info was posted on this & other forums about 3 weeks ago I've been to B & M about 4 times and blanked, but today patience & watercraft paid off and I finally managed to bag just over 3 lbs of elusive, stinky river pig.

Alas I can't get out there till the 18th...9 weeks tomorrow. The city-centre barbel I'll have to go after on the 16th are in quite a contrasting sort of spot... last time I looked (after the floods), not just post-industrial but more like post-apocalyptic. (and if I wanted to pre-feed them...

I think we are in total agreement - 'my' stretch will still be neglected, in relative terms. You have access to your neglected stretch, all I am talking about is doing the minimum to gain access to this one. Small gaps slashed in undergrowth - and I don't slash without first poking around a bit...

"Do not lose its opposite", indeed. Then I shall bear those last two arguments in mind, as interesting counter-voices to the nostalgic old *rses in our club who say "I remember when that stretch was all nice pegs, what a pity its gone to waste." It's only one of many unfished stretches on this...

Thanks! I've caught barbel a few hundred yards upstream of 'my' stretch, and I've caught barbel a mile and a bit downstream, and then there's this mile or so of similar river in between, so it's a pretty good bet that they are there. I just want to join those stretches up, if you like, and...

I'm aiming for about 20 pegs in about 20 hours over 3 pre-season days, but in my experience of other stretches nearby I'll spend more of that time clearing access along the bank than I will actually clearing the bank itself. My experience from last season also tells me that if I open 20...

Thanks Mike. Sounds like good advice on most stretches, but from May onwards any sort of view of, or access to, these particular banks is literally impenetrable without hacking first along the bank top and then down , and there is so much river to spare that to be honest even if 'my' pegs get...

sorry repeat post.

thanks for the reply. Been thinking about this, and I do fancy trying to turn them on to my baits in advance, because these will be pegs that could all too easily be overfed during a fishing session. I'm thinking of trying a campaign of pre-baiting with 'cheese stones' in some swims. After...

As a project in the last 3 weeks or so of the closed season, I intend to spend quite a lot of time clearing banks and pegs on a mile or so of river that has not been fished for years and where there is not even any sort of footpath parallel to the overgrown banks - just jungle. Decades ago it...

What a fantastic photo - thanks for posting. The best posts in the thread are of course the ones that include the word 'train'. My dog is half Springer spaniel, half husky, but essentially behaves like a Springer in most ways. So if he was loose on the river bank he would be disruptive to us...

Trial and error for me has left me preferring hair for my stiff cheese paste, with the bend of the hook just covered by the top of the big ball of paste. Very few chub bites missed that way last winter.

They were certainly feeding today... unfortunately, or fortunately when you put my kind of spin on it, I was watching anglers just above and below me catching (and even netting for one of them), I now know where they were feeding and it wasn't quite where I've been targeting them...

I haven't used much paste since the end of the winter chub season in March but when I started with it, it often flew off the hair. I just kept developing the consistency till it pretty much always stayed on. Bet it'll take me a while to get the consistency back again this winter.

So could today & tomorrow be decent mild days for barbel fishing where I am in W. Yorks, I wonder? It's been dry for a couple of weeks and nights have been quite wintery, down to foggy 5, 6, 7 degrees at night including this morning,and rivers fairly unproductive ...but with this weather front...

Because I'm short of cash and cycle around with my rods on me bike quite a lot, so it's just not worth buying posh ones, I get second-hand carp rods from a generation where carp rods were of the 1.75-2 lb type t/c, average cost £15 on gumtree etc , and from the Wye to the Nidd they've do me...