Barbel Bashing at Ashmoor Lakes

At long last it was time for the start of a weekends fishing. First up Saturday was Ashmoor Lakes, lakes stuffed with fish of all sorts of shapes and sizes, I was just going to target all that swims as its been a while and just need a bite or two.

I was not going to delude myself, it was pretty cold so was not expecting a massive amount of action, I decided to start o the feeder, towards the car park corner on Lake 3 using a flatbed feeder and fake caster for bait. I was getting bites but nothing much so I changed over to a maggot, I had a couple of small Bream but nothing else so I moved behind Steve onto Lake 2 with instant results, first fish was a Barbel, which was the last fish I thought would be on the feed, but in the next couple of hours I had 4 Barbel only up to a pound or so but an unbelievable fight for it size.

Sadly the weather soon changed and it got very cold, all it took was a slight wind and it was enough to turn the fish right off.

After an hour or so of the freezing wind and no bites we decided to call it day, we had had a few fish between us so all was good and we left in high spirits.

You can't get better.

This month we decided to fish Ashmoor lakes, mainly because we was unsure on the weather so decided to keep close to home, plus we love this fishery.

I picked Steve up at 6:45 and arrived at Ashmoor around 7am.

We grabbed our gear and headed around the ponds for a look. Fo

r a change we headed to the far side of lake 2. I had a Barbel rod set-up for Carp and a flat bed feeder on a quiver rod for everything else. I was experimenting with my Carp set-up and had 6 solid PVA bags on leaders ready made to tie on and try, first was a bloodworm dumbbell tipped with flouro corn packed with 1-4mm pellet. This was placed in the corner along the bank, and before I had even sorted the next rod it was away, a lovely Mirror was my prize of a few pound, great start. Next I put out a peperami dumbbell tipped with pink corn, again in PVA bag put in the same place. This time I even got round to sorting the other rod then it screamed off, and another Carp was in the net. I put a pineapple pop up out next and carried on with my feeder fishing, which was disturbed yet again by the alarm with another Carp. With this I put the Barbel “sleeper” rod out the way so I can concentrate on my feeder fishing.

After a couple of Bream and a small Carp it slowed up, so we moved back to our old favourite swims the other side of the lake, I feeder fished the island in front of me and had my sleeper rod fishing with the yellow pop up in the edge. I was catching well with many Carp and Bream but started to slow. I swapped my feeder rod for float rod and started fishing in the edge with instant success, adding Perch and Barbel to the tally of fish. The sun was now well up and it was surprisingly really warm for March, so I shallowed up and started Rudd fishing, I have no idea how many I caught but it was a lot with the odd Bream and Hybrid.

There was a few Carp cruising about on the surface so I decided to have a wonder around and found a few fish in lake 1 around the pipe, there was two younger anglers fishing lake 1 in the far corner but they had no luck, and after catching 5 off the top I did wonder why they was not following suit.

I returned to my swim to finish the day float fishing and catching a few more.

As usual we end the day with a shed load of fish and wondering why people fish anywhere else, and the fact there was 5 other people fishing which only one other angler caught a couple of fish, what they do is just mind boggling.