Sunday 20/05/01

Brian 22:00
Dave 37:00
Barry 40:08
Andy 52:08
Andy 53:00
Andy 56:00
Dave 57:00
Brian 65:00
Barry 82:00

Dave McGraw with his 102lb

Our first days fishing on the mighty Ebro. After a cross-country, sometimes off road, trip we find a swim to fish on the top lake. Martin’s boat is in dock so we can’t get to the swims he wants to fish the easy way. Martin assures us that he knows exactly where he is going (lying bastard), but we do see some nice remote Spanish countryside and plenty of wildlife, some of which we manage to run over. “Sorry green lizard”.

The swim, which is really a largish gap in the bushes is in need of some preparation and some heavy duty gardening is done so we have room to fish eight rods. Martin explains that as we are all looking a bit out of condition, he is doing us no end of good by making us carry all the gear, including the small boat, up and down a near vertical cliff face. So after an hour or two and much heavy breathing we are ready to fish.

Our ambitions for this trip were very simple. For Brian and me it was to catch a catfish as we had not previously caught one and for Barry and Andy it was to improve on their British personal bests. We had a week so there was a good chance of success.

We didn’t need a week, we all achieved our goals in little more than 90 minutes. Martin could barely row the baits out fast enough. As it was all new to us we could not give him much help (apart from the fact that we were all knackered from humping all the gear about) so Martin spent all of his time explaining the rigs, methods and finer points to fishing for, hooking and landing cats and rowing back and forth in his little green boat, placing baits on the buoy rigs.

What a fantastic start, 18 runs with 9 fish landed, biggest 82lb, and all in the space of about 4 hours, if you take off the time it took us to prepare the swim and transport the tackle and gear.

It couldn’t get better than this! We all came back that night completely knackered but very, very pleased with ourselves. We didn’t do much ourselves other than follow Martin’s instructions, and learn from an expert.

Monday 21/05/01

The next day dawned bright and we all set off to nab a few baits, easy for experienced fishermen like us, shouldn’t take more than an hour or two! WRONG, it was teatime by the time we had caught enough, so we decided to forego the catfishing for the day and go to the bar in town for a dinner and have a few beers followed by an early night. WRONG. Our early night turned into a bit of a session and we got to bed about 3a.m. (So much for an early start next day). 

Tuesday 22/05/01

Brian 12:00
Andy 15:00
Barry 23:00
Andy 35:00
Brian 46:00
Barry 47:08
Dave 53:12
Brian 64.08
Andy 73:00
Dave 100:08

We decided to split up and two of us fish from the boat and two from the bank. Brian and I fished from the boat and after dropping Barry and Andy off in a likely looking swim we headed up river for an introduction to the gentle art of drifting with the clonk. It was going to be impossible to repeat Sunday’s performance, so a nice easy day in the boat would be lovely.

We drifted through some stunning countryside with fantastic views but our nice easy day soon came to an abrupt end as we started to get run after run on our drifted carp baits.
Brian managed to catch the smallest fish in the Ebro system and we wondered how a 12lb catfish could contemplate eating a carp, which was nearly half its size. Greedy little bugger.

We managed some very nice fish with Brian boating a 64.08lb and me hooking into a monster which would just not give up. We had thought that the tackle Martin had was a bit over the top up to then, but now I knew it was not. The fish would not give up, it just went on and on fighting. It was the hardest fight I have ever had with a fish, or anything else for that matter. When she surfaced she was huge 100.08lb. To say I was over the moon would be an understatement. When we got back to Andy and Barry we found that they had had a shed load as well with Andy landing the biggest at 73lb. WHAT A DAY.

Wednesday 23/05/01

Brian 40ish
Dave 40ish
Brian 50ish
Andy 58:08
Barry 92:00
Barry 95:00
Dave 102:00

Our turn on the bank today. We are tying our own rigs and baiting our own rods we’re on our own. Barry and Andy are with Martin in the boat and Brian and I are left to fend for ourselves bouy fishing from the bank.

Brian breaks the news that he can’t swim, which is nice because it’s his turn to row the baits out. We decide (a no-brainer really), if he took he’s turn rowing the baits out and managed to fall in he would most certainly drown, so it’s down to muggins to be the bait rower for the rest of the trip, oh well I suppose I need the exercise.

We take turns at the rods and I get lucky on the forth take, another hundred pounder. Bloody hell! Being 6’3” and weighing 20 stone, I have always wanted a picture with a really big fish, most fish even specimen size 30lb+ carp and 30lb pike look ridiculously small when I hold them. Now I have two pictures of hundred pounders.

The two boys in the boat had a great day too, with Barry landing a brace of nineties. Barry has no trouble with fish pictures, as he is half my size and him holding a 3lb chub is the same, proportion wise, as me holding a 20lb carp.
 
Thursday 24/05/01

Andy 15:00
Andy 18:00
Barry 20:00
Andy 70:00
Barry 74:08

Nice day sunbathing on the boat, Martin clonked till he dropped but no fish. When we get back to pick up Barry and Andy we find that they have had a good day with fish up to 74 lb. As we help them pack the gear onto the boat the temperature is still in the 90’s, the sun is just going down and we are eaten alive by ferocious mosquitoes, so we quickly smother ourselves with repellent to ward them off. We throw the rest of the gear into the boat and set off for home as fast as possible. On the way back we are rounding a bend in the river doing about 30 knots when Martin takes his glasses off and wipes the sweat out of his eyes. He immediately screams that he’s gone blind and lets go of the steering wheel and the boat does a 90 degree turn and careers across the river heading for the rocky cliffs, I thought we were all about to die! The dopey sod forgot that he’s hands were smothered with mozy repellent and some had got into his eyes. I wouldn’t mind but we were paying money for a nice relaxing holiday and so far he’d had us humping gear up and down cliffs, we’d been eaten alive with mozies and now the bastard’s trying to kill us, a fine way to treat your customers. But he made up for it when we got back by cooking a huge barbecue full of all the stuff that’s no good for you, it was delicious.

Friday 25/05/01

Dave 40:00
Brian 50:00
Brian 64:00
Barry 69:00
Andy 76:08
Dave 77:08
Andy 97:08
Barry 99:00

It’s Brian and me on the bank today and we’re dropped off on an island. The swim we are in is covered with very lush grass which has never been stepped on, you get the feeling that we are the first fishermen ever to fish there, we are probably not but it’s a nice feeling anyway and the scenery is great.

There’s a nice drop off about 50 yards out which Martin finds with his fishfinder and he drops the buoys along it prior to heading up river with Barry and Andy. I set to rowing the baits out in the little green dingy and find that the flow is quite strong and by the time I get all four rods finished I’m exhausted. As I row back from the last rod and before I reach land I see Brian picking up the first rod and striking into a fish, here we go again! When I do eventually reach the shore, I was just in time to see Brian’s rod go slack as the hooked pulled which was a bit of a bummer but at least we had fish in the swim.

Whilst we are waiting for the next catfish Brian slings a carp rod out behind the island and proceeds to get a series of steaming runs from some quite decent sized carp, so he’s happy.

We get runs on our catfish rods steadily throughout the day and take turns at striking them, it seems that every time it’s Brian’s turn the run is dropped, not his fault just the luck of the draw. As Brian has had the least amount of luck so far on the trip I really wanted him to catch a biggy so I told him to keep hitting the strikes until he hooked a decent sized fish. A little while later he struck into a good fish and landed a 50 pounder, a good start but I wanted him to get a bigger one if possible. But his luck wasn’t in at all today, we unhooked the fish and as he was kneeling down to pose for a photo he managed to kneel on a 6/0 treble hook which went straight in past the barb just below his knee. Brian was walking about with it stuck in his knee for two hours, before the boys in the boat picked us up. It bothered me more than him (strange bloke). So he had to go to the local clinic for some minor surgery after we packed up for the day. Even so he managed to land a decent 64 pounder whilst hopping about on one leg.

Barry and Andy had a brilliant day on the boat with both landing 90 LB+ fish, Barry only missing the ton by one pound. Never mind though, when Barry is photographed with a 99 pounder it looks like a 200 pounder.

So that’s it, five days catfishing on the river Ebro, well not even full days actually, more like half days if you don’t count the time spent catching bait, with a total of nearly a ton of cats between us. It’s over a ton of fish if you include the carp we caught. If that’s not a brilliant result I don’t know what is.

Thank you Martin for all the hard work you put in to make this a trip that none of us will forget. Without your guidance and expertise we would not have had a clue where to start and we now would be confident in being able tackle the mighty Ebro on our own if we wanted to secure in the knowledge that we could catch. We wont though, as it’s a lot easier to book another trip with you. The only downside is that you have completely ruined our carp fishing, we can never catch a carp again without thinking of it as bait.

Note (Barry managed to injure his back whilst paying his fish and subsequently had several weeks off work with a prolapsed disc. So be careful.)


Dave McGraw, Andy Stafford, Barry Timms, Brian Julian
(The Southfield’s Specimen Group)