Nigel told us “I managed to find two big barbel on my chosen stretch earlier in the year which helped me narrow down an area to concentrate on, one of the barbel I estimated to be over 16lb.

I had a couple trips in the area over the space of a week and landed three barbel to 10lb7oz.

On my latest session I arrived in the afternoon with my mate Si and we found the stretch deserted. I settled into my swim and bait dropped six droppers of 12mm and 14mm whole, half and crushed boilies in and cast my bolt rig with a mesh pva bag of the same mix into the swim.

I’m not a fan of casting my rig every hour like some people, instead preferring to leave the rig until I hook a fish, the rig had been in place for three and half hours and I was just thinking of reeling in to leave for work when I got the bite I was hoping for.

The barbel ran downstream to a thick weed bed, the same weed bed I had managed to lose a good barbel just a couple of days prior in the same swim so I had my drag tighter than normal and I managed to turn it away but it tried a couple of more times to reach the weed bed, thankfully unsuccessfully.

After the third attempt I could tell it was tiring and after that it just plodded around the swim were I managed to land it on the first attempt. I knew it was a good fish but didn’t realise how big it was until I tried to lift it up the bank. When I placed it on the unhooking mat I knew it’s was a pb and that i had finally broke the 16lb barrier. I called Si down and we weighed the barbel at 16lb 12oz, beating my old pb of 15lb15oz. After a few quick photos I had to rush off to get to work and drove down the motorway with a huge smile on my face.”