RFCA MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
Nick Ince on patience, process, and why the reward is never just the fish
Some rivers get under your skin. The Ribble is one of them.
Nick Ince has been fishing it for the best part of five or six years now, and he’ll be the first to tell you that the early days were nothing to write home about. A fish here, a blank there, and a whole lot of time spent staring at a rod tip trying to work out what he was missing. “Success came slowly,” he says, with the kind of matter-of-fact honesty that only proper barbel anglers seem to manage. “Long blanks in between. But the Ribble has a way of rewarding persistence.”
Those early sessions were mostly spent on the free stretches, quietly piecing things together. Not just fishing – studying. Reading the water. Learning where the crease lines form, where the flow drops off, where a barbel might hold at different heights. It’s the kind of education that can’t be rushed, and Nick wasn’t trying to rush it. He was also waiting, patiently, for a place on the books of the Prince Albert Angling Association.
When the invite finally arrived, something clicked.
Peace and Purpose
Nick’s club’s private stretches offered him something the free water rarely can: room to think. Fewer rods, less disturbance, and the kind of quiet that lets you concentrate properly on what’s happening in front of you rather than who’s setting up downstream.
Nick’s approach through the warmer months is methodical and, crucially, uncluttered. A bed of hemp goes in first to get things moving. Then a cage feeder packed with mixed small pellets and groundbait, fished on a running rig, hooklength rarely pushing beyond 18 inches. Clean. Efficient. The sort of setup that looks almost too simple until you start catching on it consistently.
“I have always believed that overcomplicating things can be your biggest mistake on a river”
Timing is part of it too. Nick tends to arrive a couple of hours before the prime window – usually dusk and into darkness – gets the swim built, and waits. He’s learned that the Ribble barbel don’t always move to the clock, but that patience is the closest thing to a guarantee you’re going to get.
Bait: Simple, Trusted, Proven
On the hookbait front, Nick has done the experimenting so he doesn’t have to keep doing it. Years of trialling different flavours have left him with a short, trusted list from Vortex Baits – C.K.O, Frankfurter Spice, and Red Salmon – with a more recent addition of a custom GLM-based bait in 14mm pellets and barrels. When something works, you stick with it.
Confidence in your bait frees up mental space, and Nick’s of the view that the brain power is better spent on location and presentation anyway. Get those two right and the bait almost looks after itself.
Come autumn and into winter, the approach changes. Feed drops off sharply – often what’s in the feeder is more than enough for a cold-water session. Location becomes the whole game. Nick will rotate his areas depending on water levels, clarity, and temperature, reading the river’s mood the same way he’s been reading it since those early free-stretch days.
The River as Reset Button
Ask Nick why he fishes the Ribble and he’ll talk tactics for a while, and then he’ll go quiet for a moment before getting to what he actually means. The fishing matters. But the river matters more.
“Time on the bank is my reset button,” he says. Away from work, away from the daily churn. The steady pull of moving water, the rhythm of the cast, the dark settling in around you – it’s difficult to explain what that does for the head unless you’ve felt it yourself.
And then, of course, the alarm goes off. The rod wrenches round, the reel screams, and everything changes. A barbel in fast water is a different kind of heavy. The first downstream run catches you every time, no matter how many you’ve had. “That surge of adrenaline is electric,” he says. The deep bronze flank in the net under the beam of a headtorch. The weight of a fish that’s spent its whole life working against a current.
But…. Nick is clear: those moments are the reward, not the reason.
Still Learning
Five or six years in, and Nick Ince would be the last person to tell you he’s got the Ribble figured out. That’s part of what keeps him coming back. Every season adds something – a swim he hadn’t tried, a tactic he hadn’t trusted, a stretch of river that looks unremarkable until the light drops and it comes alive.
The Ribble is a river that gives a lot to the angler willing to put in the time. Nick Ince has been putting in the time. And by the sound of things, he’s nowhere near done.