Seeing how the trout season was coming to an end, the last weekend of september was going to be our last chance to fish for trout. Bart, who ahd never (fly-)fished in his life before, joined Jeroen and myself for what was supposed to be a weekend of fishing for brown trout. As usual we headed up to the little town of Ouren on the Belgian, Luxemburg and German borders. The friendly folks of “Camping International” just on the Belgian side of the border rented us a hut and by three o’clock on

Friday we were standing knee deep in a very low river Our. Most of the Ardenne rivers turned out to be quite low that weekend and to my dissapointment the trout were almost nowhere to be found. We cought a few small ones here and there, but it was obvious circumstances weren’t normal.

Barbel

In the river Our there’s a large population of both nose carp and barbel. We always see them, as they don’t particularly try to hide. They tend to swim in quite large groups of up to 20-30 fish and we have never been able to catch them on the fly. We tried a lot of things and even hooked the accidental one in the past but we could never really find a way to interest them in the flies we presented. And so after the usual half an hour of looking at the large fish so close by and trying everything, we’d just concentrate on the trout and enjoy ourselves either way. But this time it was different. When Jeroen placed a heavy nimph on the bottom of the river and tapped the line just slightly, it attracted the interest of a large Barbel, which went for the nimph and suddenly found himself hooked. After a nice fight Jeroen was able to show us the the first barbel. Of course we were delighted, to finally land one of these giants, but we became more excited when it turned out this had not just been a lucky shot. That same day we hooked quite a lot of barbels and landed several big ones. The curse had been lifted, the “Wielick-method” and “Wielick-nimph” had been invented and the barbel was no longer safe!

The rest of the weekend brought hardly any trout, but the barbel was fair game and Jeroen also managed to catch some nice large roach. It’s tough that we’re going to have to wait about 7 months before we’ll be able to fish for trout again, but when we do I’m sure we won’t forget to try for barbel.