New record barbel

[Dave Burr]

I've had barbel from the Seine and the Lot where the average size of chub was impressive too. Most of the large French rivers hold barbel and an accomplished barbel angler I know swears blind he watched three double figure fish near a bridge on the Dordogne.

The trouble with barbel is getting them onto 'unnatural' baits. In the early days on the Wye and subsequently on newly opened sections, the barbel wouldn't look at meat, pellets or even corn. Extensive baiting got them going but, our French cousins are quite reticent to throw free food into the rivers. Mind you, with maggots at over a Euro per handful of maggots....

I do believe that some good barbel fishing could be found for anybody who has the time to work at it - any takers Mole Patrol? In the mean time fish will be taken where they recognise bait due usually to carp anglers or by those using naturals, flies etc.

As for 6lb tc rods. In Spain we used Uptider rods of 6lb test and they were capable of landing anything in the Ebro, and they grow to over 250lbs. But the guides 4lb test carp rod could only land a 100lb plus fish after 45 - 60 minutes of grunt, sweat and swearing. The reason being - it was 12' long whereas the heavy jobs were about 9'

[Mole-Patrol]

Dave, I have researched the French barbel issue extensively, spoken to and contacted by email a lot of French anglers. There are many reports of fish to over 10kg being seen, but sadly nothing to corroborate them. There is a sort of record list in France and the largest barbel wouldn't be a river record in at least ten UK rivers and was caught over thirty years ago by an angler fishing for pike. The next two are around 12lb - 13lb and again fell to lure anglers.

The largest barbel that I know have been recently landed are in the north of the country; the Seine system, further east towards the Belgian border and a couple of rivers in Brittany. 10lb - 12lb is about as big as they come. The Rhone system holds them around that weight too.

Further south the Marne, a tribuary of the Seine seems to have a good population of scraper doubles or near doubles, but the Loire system doesn't hold large barbel as far as I have been able to establish. There are thousands of small ones and you can see them everywhere. But locating the large ones is a different proposition and when I follow up a story about an angler catching a 'gros barbeau' it usually turns out to be a 6lb-er at most.

The Lot and Dordogne are increasingly popular with British carp anglers who publish photos and videos of their carp captures, but again, no barbel of any size. I have fished Vienne and Charente extensively over 100 km on each river and have never seen anything larger than the 9lb 3oz fish I banked earlier this year. There are carp to over 40lb in both rivers and the conditions of the Charente would seem to be perfect but the fish are not coming out, if they are actually there. You can see great shoals of fish to 3lb all over, but look in the deep runs and channels, under weed rafts, etc and there is nothing approaching double figures.

Your point about the naivety of French fish is valid. There are a few baits however that will be readily taken even if fish have never experienced them before. Luncheon meat is one of them as are home made pork meatballs, Frolicks dog biscuits, anything with cheese in it and maize. They go crazy for maize. I've also done OK with cooked whelks and prawns, raw mussels and paste flavoured with Marmite. They also react well to smoked paprika flavouring. The main problem is that these naive fish is that they do not respond to baiting in the same way. Actually finding them is far more important and successful than trying to lure them in with bait.

I travel about 60km from home in all directions during my work and when I pass a stretch of river I often get out and walk the banks, check the depth and flow and generally suss it out. As such I've probably seen and mapped more of my local rivers than most anglers and believe me I have applied all the conventional logic that has worked for many years in the UK and I can honestly say that I have never seen a barbel in France that I thought would go over 10lb.

It drives me mad!

[Olly]

I am glad my take on barbel fishing in France is somewhere near accurate - at least that seems to be the info given.

When in France - I forget barbel - we have the best fishing in Europe in the UK!

Roach, rudd, cats & carp as well as zander for me when there. It is just nice to escape the sheer pressure by carpers on big carp in the UK and to catch carp - commercial fishery size - but wilder! Many of the French commercials are just carp fished by visitors from abroad.

Just enjoy the food, sunshine, & relax - - unless you want giant carp.

[Kev D]

Could it be the old Biomass thing? A habitat can only support a certain mass of life . So a proper,healthy, habitat for barbel in which they thrive and reproduce naturally will produce a large population . Their size will be limited by food availability and the ability of the water to deal with their "waste matter". In other words a proper barbel habitat can be measured by the good numbers of small to medium fish rather than than the cadre of aging ,overblown survivors that result from artificial historical stocking.
Stick a few dozen adult barbel or a few hundred fingerlings in a virgin water and there will be food for all and they will initially grow well. Even better ,if the water isn't quite right for reliable breeding there will be little culinary competition and these fish will get bigger and more famous. Then they will get deliberately fattened-up on obscene amounts of anglers' groundbait. They get caught so many times they learn to lay on the mat and "lurv the camera daahling".Then they die,and there are few naturally produced fish to replace them because the the river may not have been perfect for barbel in the first place.
Trouble is ,barbel are big and trendy. A river authority can wack barbel into a river as a crowd pleasing distraction to counteract other issues.
Or am I a cynic?
But when you think that the barbel record stood around 14lb for years ,it would be fair to think of that as a very good natural weight ....Then anglers got rich enough to oik tins of spam and buckets of boilies about like confetti -fattening their victims like piglets ,or carp Interesting how many big barbel have been caught on flies and lures. Including potential record breakers ,claims for which were not submitted due to them being caught out of season by Game anglers.

[Liphook]

Interesting stuff! In the recent low water summer fly fishing conditions we've had here in the NW of England I have been targeting late summer barbel with multiple tungsten beaded gadger/stonefly nymph/creeper patterns tied on far from subtle hooks. Depth chargers. Nothing like doubles as yet but they go well on a thoroughly modern, stiff butted, 11ft #5 'euronympher' set up including the des rigours french leaders. I horse my fish in on strong nylon by dropping the tip and flexing into the cork. A quick release is a good release. That to me is true sport fishing - I never knowingly fish light and abhor those that do. "Show the fish the rod!" my Papa often said. Good advice. That will be for another thread. Maybe. Someday. Good job the sea trout run on very little water, yet now in early winter we've had more water than you'd want. That's fishing. And life!

[Mole-Patrol]

The biomass argument is also valid. But take into account that competing species like carp are more able to supplement their diet than specialist feeders such as barbel so can out compete them. I have fished a stretch of the Vienne near a village called Moussac. It is perfect for barbel having a good reliable flow, gravel bottom, good weed growth and ideal depth. It gently shelves deeper from the bridge to around 3 metres deep then shallows up over a hard bottom to a metre at the furthest point before it goes into rapids. It is perfect! Yet the barbel caught there by the (illegal) night time carp fishermen are around 6lb maximum. The carp, in this environment are growing to mid-forties. Even 100km+ upstream at St Leonard-de-Noblat where trout and grayling can be caught carp run to 20lb and the barbel are topping at around 5lb. Carp are simply out competing the barbel in my opinion.

Another factor is that where I would expect large solitary barbel to be holed up invariably large catfish are present. Perhaps the largest barbel end up as cat meat? This would explain the skimming off of the larger barbel that tend to break away from the shoals and live in small groups or on their own amongst tree roots in the deeper parts of the river.

The largest barbel species are found in places like the Middle-East through to Turkey and are almost entirely predatory as are the large Iberian strains of barbel and the largest are found in the still waters of large dams. Also, some of the smaller Iberian strains in rivers readily take dry flies. I have caught barbel in the Wharfe whilst trout and grayling fishing with flies ans seen shoals of mid sized barbel feeding on nymphs and buzzers drifting downstream as the ascend to hatch. Barbel are adaptable as a species but I think that barbus barbus isn't adaptable enough to survive the competition from alien species such as carp and catfish.

Just my 2 cents.

[Rutilus]

Could it be the old Biomass thing? A habitat can only support a certain mass of life . So a proper,healthy, habitat for barbel in which they thrive and reproduce naturally will produce a large population . Their size will be limited by food availability and the ability of the water to deal with their "waste matter". In other words a proper barbel habitat can be measured by the good numbers of small to medium fish rather than than the cadre of aging ,overblown survivors that result from artificial historical stocking.
Stick a few dozen adult barbel or a few hundred fingerlings in a virgin water and there will be food for all and they will initially grow well. Even better ,if the water isn't quite right for reliable breeding there will be little culinary competition and these fish will get bigger and more famous. Then they will get deliberately fattened-up on obscene amounts of anglers' groundbait. They get caught so many times they learn to lay on the mat and "lurv the camera daahling".Then they die,and there are few naturally produced fish to replace them because the the river may not have been perfect for barbel in the first place.
Trouble is ,barbel are big and trendy. A river authority can wack barbel into a river as a crowd pleasing distraction to counteract other issues.
Or am I a cynic?
But when you think that the barbel record stood around 14lb for years ,it would be fair to think of that as a very good natural weight ....Then anglers got rich enough to oik tins of spam and buckets of boilies about like confetti -fattening their victims like piglets ,or carp Interesting how many big barbel have been caught on flies and lures. Including potential record breakers ,claims for which were not submitted due to them being caught out of season by Game anglers.

Cynic? No, and I think close to the mark here in the UK anyway.

[Mole-Patrol]

Back in the UK my local river was only 20 miles long from source to confluence. Historically there were barbel in all but the upper five or six miles. It suffered terribly with pollution from textile and coal industries, but after the river became clean again some barbel that had lived above the pollution zone began to populate the lower part of the river. Back in the 1970s the only club that I know of that ever controlled part of the fishing stocked barbel in the middle reaches. Now there are at least 12 double figure barbel in a three mile stretch. In that stretch I never caught a barbel of less than 7lbs, usually they were 8lb or more. My friend has taken 12 different doubles and the record is over 16lb. Now that river is hardly fished even now and whilst those barbel were growing to double figures much of the river would not have seen an angler from one month t the next and then he would be fishing for roach, chub or trout with maggots. The chub go to over 6lb and the roach 3lb. Another angler I used to speak to had three 4lb perch in one session from the same swim. There are no factories pumping nutrients into the river, it flows predominantly through farm land and derelict collieries.

So why have those fish grown so large in such a small environment? Firstly there were no carp in there until the floods of around 2007/8 when carp accessed the lower reaches, well below the large barbel zone. No catfish either and not too many pike. Another reason is that the river became infested with signal crayfish about twenty to thirty years ago. I could catch over 30in as many minutes using three nets. The river is snided with them and I believe that has something to do with it.

[Dave Burr]

Biomass is a complex subject but, if you look back at the boom of barbel fishing that erupted in the early 90's, things were very different back then. Take the river Kennet for example. Catches of 20 to 30 barbel could be made in a sitting with nothing going over 8lbs and most well below it. I remember fishing at Thatcham with Fred Crouch when the syndicate section there had yet to produce a double. Not many years later and you may get 4 or 5 fish but most would be over the magic 10lbs. The numbers had dropped dramatically but the average size went haywire.

The number of rivers producing barbel (many through illegal introduction), also coincided with the great slump in roach fishing. I do not necessarily connect the two although they both feed in similar areas and at similar times. No, there are other factors that did for the roach on many waters such as pollution, cormorants and crayfish. Barbel may well have taken their biomass and grown on, who knows??

We had severe summer flooding in 2007 and that altered many rivers - mainly for the worst. It's all supposition and conjecture.

Going back to France and indeed Spain, it may be that their rivers are like the Kennet was, mixed species rivers in prime balance. In Spain I've caught lots of barbel to about 5-6lb but anything over 10lbs (all of which have avoided my baits) are Comizo's which are mainly predatory but which still fall to feeder/maggots.

Logic dictates that in every UK river there has always been a few bigger fish, so why not France? There must be a few but maybe they become more predatory too - hence falling to lures. One thing's for certain, whereas I once planned to live in France and make big barbel location a major plan, those days have gone and I'm happy to fish for the carp when over there. I still prefer fishing the rivers though so maybe..... one day.....

[Mole-Patrol]

The River Charente from Angouleme downstream on paper should hold massive barbel. About 30km upstream it runs into limestone country and this geology continues for most of its length through Charente-Maritime. The river is absolutely verdant, teeming with insect life and has a variety of features; weirs, locks, deep canalised stretches and faster flowing shallow water. The bottom is mostly hard and it supports carp to over 50lb, catfish pushing 150lb and 30lb pike. The roach fishing in some areas is superb with 2lb fish common. Yet the barbeaux of any size are absent. A couple of months ago I went off in search of tidal barbel in the hope that I might find the Elderado of French barbel fishing. I was thwarted by flood water that made the intended swim unfishable. It hasn't stopped raining since. But next summer I shall park the camping-car alongside la belle Charente and have three days of tidal fishing to scratch my itch.

The ironic thing is that I often have travelled over an hour each way to locations I have reccied and ear-marked as possible places for large barbel, but the two largest I have so far caught have been 11 and 15 minutes from home.