Ebro madness part 1

Upon reading many fishing blogs over the years and dreaming of catching my own leviathan of the deep I finally decided to book a trip to the famous river Ebro in Spain.

It was mid april and we were met with a heat wave that had locals hiding under anything that gave any shade.
We began of with a 3 hour baiting campaign using 25mm halibut pellets by the bucket. The bait was taken out on the small putput boat at a distance of over 200 yards.
After we had settled the bait and the rods were primed and set, we finally started fishing. Altnough I would say the first few hours seemed yo fly past as we got to know our guide Andy and his side kick Grayham.

At first the heat was playing with my eyes as I was seeing taps on rod 1, no sooner had I double looked the rod bent over double and started stripping line from the heavily loaded reel. I quickly jumped up and struck into my first fish.
Instantly I knew that I had found a good size fish as I did what was called the ebro shuffle, fighting against the dirt with my feet. Holding on to the rod for dear life, quick look to the left gave me confirmation as the guide was instantly excited muttering "Good fish kid, good fish."

22 mins of tearing me across the huge mouth of the river had started to take its toll as I managed to regain some line back seeing a huge boil of water arise as the fish tired. I was sure this was a good size catfish seeing a long shaddow brake the surface.
And ghe guide waded in and grabbed the leader and guided the catfish to the bank while Grayham grabbed tge rod so i could jump in and land the fish with Andy. . My heart was pounding when its head came above the waters surface.

Finally I felt what I had been dreaming of for so long. A fish that gave everything it had and a new pb for any speacies that I think will be very hard to break for a long time.

The time had come, It was weigh in time and the catfish was slipped into a big sack and hooked to a bar with scales attatched. . A few seconds and it finannly settled on a grand total of 128.lb8oz.

I had a total of 22 catfish over five days with 3 over 100lb. One thing I can say is they are greedy fish. 12 x 25kg sacks of bait.

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With the bank fishing part of the trip was nearing an end I put my efforts to searching one of those infamous Ebro carp. It seemed like the fishing gods were sat on my shoulders as we was graced with 4 carp in total with my rods gracing two of them weighing 28.5lb and 31.5lb