I used to fish barbel the way most younger anglers do – long sessions, heavy bait quantities, moving little, and treating a blank as something to simply out-wait through sheer time on the bank. Twenty years and a fair number of aching backs later, my approach has changed quite a bit, and I think it’s actually made me more effective, not just more comfortable.
The biggest change is scaling down session length in favour of more frequent, shorter, more focused trips. Rather than one twelve-hour Saturday session, I’ll fish three or four shorter evening sessions across a week, moving between swims more readily if nothing’s happening after 90 minutes. It suits my schedule better now, but it’s also made me a sharper angler – less inclined to sit out a genuinely dead swim just because I’ve already invested hours in it.
I’ve also cut back significantly on bait quantity. Where I used to introduce generous amounts of feed on the basis that more attracts more fish, I now feed much more conservatively and trust the swim choice itself to be doing the real work. Barbel in particular seem to respond well to a smaller, well-placed bed of bait rather than a heavy carpet of feed that can, on some rivers, actually put fish off if it’s more than they’re used to encountering.
None of this is really about age making me wiser exactly – it’s more that less time and patience for pointless waiting forced me to get more efficient, and the fishing has been better for it.
Dan Whitfield started fishing aged seven on the canal at the end of his road and never really stopped. He spent his twenties and thirties on the match circuit – club level rather than national – before deciding he’d rather catch one decent fish than a net of small ones.
These days he mostly fishes the River Trent for barbel (personal best 14lb 2oz), the Oxford Canal for roach and skimmers in winter, and the occasional gravel pit when tench are spawning and the surface fishing is too good to miss. He’s a former club secretary and still helps with junior coaching at his local angling club in Nottingham.
At The River Bend, Dan writes the coarse species guides, river fishing technique articles, and the match and pole content.
Covers: Barbel, bream, roach, tench, carp (coarse context), river fishing, canal fishing, feeder, float, match/pole