I had intended to fish most of the afternoon as well as the night, but eventually arrived at 4pm, after an hour long delay on the A1 due to a lorry fire. I had been intending to go to the lane end, opposite the old wharf at Carlton, but stopped for a look in one of the fields just below the house. I was surprised to see that the Collingham AC signs were no longer being displayed, but instead, there was a sign simply saying Day Fishing. Just as I was opening the gate, a Bernard Ingham lookalike pulled up and explained that as owner of the field, he was now running the fishing himself, and at £2.50 per day, undercutting the old Collingham rate by a pound. It’s £5 if you want to fish all night though.
I was once again struck by the sheer beauty of this stretch of the Trent, and although the new sand and gravel conveyor is a bit of a monstrosity, it doesn’t seem quite as bad as I had feared, and may even act as a fish holding feature. I spent at least twenty minutes agonising over the perfect spot to fish, but decided on a spot close enough to the conveyor to entice the fish up to me, but not close enough to allow a hooked fish to bolt through all the snags that would be inevitably lodged around the support pillars.
Having arrived late, I didn’t get a bait into the water until about 6pm, but I had an uneventful three hours until the light started to fade and the chub appeared. Chub are perfectly acceptable when you are trying to salvage a bitter day in winter, but when fishing for carp and barbel they can be an absolute menace. I can never understand why matchmen mess around with fine line and small hooks, when the Trent chub will gleefully swallow a bait the size of their heads. I wonder if it is actually possible to fish a bait too big for a chub. They probably dislocate their jaws like an anaconda, and pluck unwary sheep from the water’s edge. I quickly amassed five or six of these, but when it was truly dark I added a couple of 5lb 2ozs and 5lb 6ozs; the biggest I have ever caught, but not sufficiently huge to warrant the hassle of fiddling about with a tripod, flash gun and self timer in the dark. It seemed a bit unfair to retain them until the morning, so I released each one immediately after I had weighed it.
At 4.10am, the right hand reel screamed as a fish belted off with the bait. Just as well really, as I had somehow failed to locate the line properly in the alarm. Straight away I knew this was a very big fish, as it just stayed down on the bottom, and made it pretty obvious that it wanted to stay there. Time and time again, I brought it closer to the top hoping for a glimpse of this monster in case I lost it, but it was not to be. After twenty minutes of this with still no sign of the fish, I was beginning to wonder if I had somehow latched into one of the rumoured Trent catfish, and I was almost dreading what might come up from the depths. At last, I saw enough of it to realise it was a good barbel, but at this stage I still didn’t appreciate its true size. Finally, just before I had notched up a half hour fight, I managed to get it into the net. It was only then when I realised its true size. After a very quick and crude weighing, I decided to put it in the keep sack to recover, and allow me to get better photos when the sun was rising. Barbel should never be released straight away, but should always be given time to recover. I spent about ten minutes, adjusting the sack to ensure a good flow of water, and holding the fish upright until it maintained its own equilibrium. By the time the photos were quickly taken it was fighting fit again. Two careful re-weighings only confirmed the exact same weight as before. I held the fish to face the current, then with a couple of gulps and a kick of the tail, it swam powerfully away, back into the depths once more.