15lb barbel and 7lb chub in one session from River Avon
Nigel Kennard made a triumphant return to the Hampshire Avon with the capture of a personal best 15lb 10oz barbel and a pb equalling 7lb 1oz chub.
The 35-year-old postman from Bellingham, London hadn’t fished the venue for three years until last month. Arriving at a stretch in the middle reaches of the waterway he looked in several swims before spotting a shoal of a dozen big chub.
“I’d been watching them for 10 minutes when I saw a massive barbel on a small gravel patch close in,” he said. “I decided to bait the swim with just a PVA bag of crushed Carp Company boilies and 4mm and 6mm pellets as I’d noticed barbel spooking off big beds of bait.”
An hour after casting out a 14mm boilie hookbait on a size 8 ESP D7 hook and 12lb Sink Link hooklength he received a powerful bite with line ripped off his reel as the fished headed for a weedy shallow patch downstream.
“I was able to turn him and pumped him upstream where it then plodded around under the rod tip for a couple of minutes. I could clearly see how big it was and knew it was going to be close to my old pb of 15lb 3oz.”
After releasing his prize he fed the swim with six boilies every 20 minutes for two hours in a bid to get the chub to feed and scaled down his tackle to a 10lb hooklink and size 10 hook with a 1oz running lead.
“I got my second bite of the day just after dark and could tell straight away that it was a chub. It went in the net without any hassle and as I lifted the net up I could tell it was a massive fish. I weighed it a 7lb 1oz which equalled my Hants Avon chub best.”
Nigel rounded off the session with three more chub weighing 6lb 10oz, 6lb 2oz and 5lb 15oz.
