A couple before the heat

 13/07/22

A session straight from work, clocking out at 21:58hrs, a quick coffee followed by a 45-minute drive and I was fishing by 23:15hrs. Similar conditions to recent sessions, clear skies, relatively warm, with 5-6ft of moderately fast walking pace water in front of me. A bit of bait was immediately thrown into the margin and towards the far bank willows, which was left undisturbed for a while whilst I set up in the dark.

Chub knocks almost instantly, despite sitting on my hands and ignoring the rod tip for as long as possible I hooked a small (2.5lb) chub, which was a bit of a swim wrecker as I didn't get a touch for almost an hour afterwards. A barbel provided the next action, a really hard unusual fight as the barbel surfaced almost immediately and stayed on the surface for the duration of the battle. 

8.01lb of hard-fighting northern river barbel

I should have headed home straight after that fish as the commotion had almost certainly scared everything in the surrounding area off. However I had one further take as I was about to leave, a 'proper' barbel take, which turned out to be a decent chub of 4.07lb

  15/07/22

Again straight from work and fishing by 23:45hrs, it was my last shift for 3 days so I could stay for as long as I could keep myself awake. Exactly the same approach as my previous sessions (it's working, why change it?!) on this stretch, a couple of balls of soaked pellet/ crushed boilie into areas on the near and far bank, with a single rod, casting in turn to each area, every 30 mins or so.

Without warning the rod hooped round just before 01:00 and a really aggressive fight developed.

Eventually, a nice barbel of 8.11 was landed, however that was it for the night. The only knocks on the rod tip were caused by the odd bat hunting moths which were attracted to the bright isotope. After first light, I recced a few more areas for future sessions and threw all the bait I had with me in as I knew I wouldn't be fishing for a while with the forecasted temperatures looking ridiculous for the UK.