Another cold, raw week with frost all week but changing on the weekend which should see a few more outings next week. Due to the weather my only visit to the bank was on Thursday the 3rd for a brief two-hour session. This was to prove to myself that a fish or two could be caught by scaling my barbel tackle on the coldest of days.

Scaling down results in more bites

If you find yourself on a river after a couple of days of frosts then you need to scale your tackle down and go in search of a species like chub that tend to feed in colder conditions. If the river contains barbel then you need to take this in mind and scale down accordingly so that your tackle will get you a few bites but also land a bonus fish if hooked. On really cold days then my main line is 6lbs straight through to a very short hooklink, 4inches made of the same. Instead of a lead l use the smallest feeder in my box that will hold bottom. Hook size is dropped to a size 14 along with the bait size, which is an 8mm Sonubaits hard pellet. The small feeder makes hardly a sound entering the water and delivers just enough bait to get a fish or two interested without the fear of overfeeding. The feed in the feeder was a mix of Hemp and Hali Crush, a new ground bait sent to me from Sonubaits.

I visited the river Loddon arriving at 1pm, not the best time of day either. On arrival an angler was leaving who had been their since first light and a brief chat revealed that he had dropped into most swims without so much as a tremble, this was going to be tough! The reason for the visit was due to a feature that was pencilled in for next Tuesday with Angling Times and already having a blank on a harder stretch the previous month for another publication I had decided that we would catch a couple of smaller fish on this easy stretch before moving on after a big barbel. I had already decided on three productive swims and after just two minutes my sonubaits pellet was picked up by a chub just shy of four pounds, followed by another smaller sample and a good dace from the other swim, amazing what pellet will catch.