I like the quiet places, you see? Not for me the commercials and heavily stocked lakes. There's no release from the shackles of work there.
I make life difficult, a kind of piscatorial masochism. I set myself challenges that I rarely fulfill, but it's not the success that drives me. I just like the difficult path.
Many of my quests are ongoing. My hit-list includes 'The Common', A double figured Tench, a Grand Union crucian to name a few.
They're all do-able, but difficult....and now I have another one niggling away at me.
I want to catch a barbel again. That's easy enough.right?....Wrong, because I want another Great Ouse barbel.
The Great Ouse wasn't easy when it was in it's heyday. Yes, we all know about those massive fish, but they were never there in the numbers one finds in the prolific barbel rivers.
The decline in Ouse barbel stocks has been dramatic. I've witnessed the decimation of those wonderful fish for years, it breaks my heart.
The fish pictured above is from the fabled Kickles Farm stretch, it was caught a few seasons back, some time after the death of The Traveller and all.
Kickles was difficult in it's prime "a blank waiting to happen"said one highly respected angler. Yet there I was after the circus had left town, cradling that fish.
I need to catch one more from the Ouse....just one.
Conversations with them that still try do not fill me with optimism. I hear of just a handful of captures a year. There are just so few.
The fish pictured here is my biggest ever barbel. It was caught from a club stretch many years ago..
...The stretch produced some very large fish up to 19lb+ and was taken over by the Barbel Society for a while.
I loved fishing there and had a lot of success....A private syndicate of 30 members fish there now and not a single barbel was caught from the stretch last season.
I just love that river, I'm going back to try for just one more...and I'll write about it here.
Further reading...here.
