"My biggest brace of barbel" - Gary Newman

I rarely spend much time on the rivers during the summer months and prefer to wait until autumn, once the banks quiet down and the fish are heavier. This year was no exception.

Having spent the summer and early autumn fishing for other species, including carp, for the first time in a few years, plus having had several filming trips and three weeks in China for my own fishing, I was starting to fancy a few sessions on my local River Thames.

I'd only fished one night on the Thames near the start of the season, which had resulted in a blank. Still, I knew that the fish would have spread out more by this time of year and wouldn't be concentrated in the weir pool nearby, where they tend to spend much time during the warmer months.

My plan was to spend a whole weekend on the river, and I regularly do this on the Thames, alongside overnight sessions. The action tends to come very late at night, and bites are generally few and reasonably far between in the areas that I fish, so this lends itself to this style of fishing with buzzers. However, I often only use one rod, depending on the swim and river conditions.

I arrived at the start of the weekend and found that I had the whole stretch. I decided to try an area that I'd fished during the winter in the past and where there was a deeper hole in the river bed. The river was relatively low and with a normal level of flow for the time of year, and I opted to fish one rod in the deeper water, with the other being fished where the hole started to shallow up a little downstream of me.

The rigs consisted of around 15 inches of 15lb Korda N-Trap Semi-Stiff on a size 8 Mixa hook, with a homemade milk protein boilie on the hair. I have total confidence in my bait, which I make entirely from scratch using my own base mix recipe and a unique flavour combination.

On this occasion, I opted for a small PVA mesh bag of chopped boilies - made from boiling a flat disc of base mix and then cutting it into strips and breaking it into pieces as required – as the fish hadn't seen much of my bait this year. If I'm fishing and baiting a stretch more regularly, then often I will opt for a single hookbait and only introduce any freebies when I pack up, and then very sparingly with half-a-dozen boilies or pieces of paste enough in each swim that I want to bait.

I was using N-Gauge 12ft 1.75lb test curve rods, which handle everything I need them to on the Thames, including using heavy leads in flood conditions. My N-Gauge Specimen reels were loaded with 10lb Dragline mono. I normally use 30lb Apex braid for most of my river fishing, as it allows me to get away with less lead and is also good for upstreaming, but I hadn't got round to switching my spools back over to that.

The first night and day proved to be uneventful, apart from plenty of problems with leaves getting caught up all over my lines, coming through at all depths in the river, and so being impossible to avoid. On the second night of my session, it was noticeable that the leaves were suddenly less of an issue, and I was able to leave my rigs in place for longer without having to recast.

Around 2am I had a steady take, with the rod tip pulled right round as the fish headed off downstream after having picked up my hookbait fished in the deep hole. It felt like a decent fish throughout the fight and when it came over the net I was thinking that it might be around 12-13lb, but it had been a while since I'd seen a barbel and had been more used to looking at big carp!

However, the scales settled on 15lb 1oz, my fifth Thames barbel of 15lb-plus and also a fish that I hadn't caught before – there is a lot of water downstream of the stretch I fish with no weirs in the way, so the fish do seem to move around a fair bit. I grabbed some self-takes and slipped it back.

That was the end of the action for the rest of the night. In the afternoon, I gave the swim a bit of a rest with no lines through it—generally, daytime is a waste of time on the Thames anyway—and decided to put the rods back out just before dark.

I quickly lifted into what felt like another good fish as it slowly and steadily took the line and headed off downstream. It put up a slow, dogged fight, typical of bigger barbel with none of the charging around you tend to get with the small ones until it finally surfaced in the torchlight, and I was able to get what looked to be a similar-sized fish.

It turned out to be slightly bigger at 15lb 3oz, and I couldn't believe that I'd managed two '15s' from the Thames on the same day, and also my biggest ever brace at 30lb 4oz in total. Since that session, conditions have been far from good, as it was followed by a spell of cold weather and then heavy rain, including a couple of big storms. The river has been high a lot of the time and absolutely raging through.

There is always a chance, though, and in the past, I've caught Thames barbel in what, in theory, were very bad river conditions, so I have been persisting, even though I have to use gear that looks more suited to sea fishing, with 8oz leads just to hold the bottom for any length of time in the closer-in spots out of the main current.

My efforts have proved to be to no avail though, but I am looking forward to the river hopefully returning to a more normal level, and also a much lower flow rate, as I really want to do some chub fishing.