The small island ‘target area’

At last a few of us found some spare time to get together on the bank together in search of a few carp……needless to say it wasn’t as simple a day as we had unfortunately anticipated!!!!

Dean sets the bobbins

The day looked to be glorious and the sun was shining from day break right through. In fact all three of us that went got well and truly toasted in the bright sunshine. The day started off with Dean and myself heading down to the lakes at around 8am with a view to seeing Peter later on after his beloved F1 had finished on the TV!

We arrived to see that all the lakes were pretty choc-a-block already by 8.15am. We opted to fish the shortest bank section behind the small island on the original carp pool. This meant that we could park fairly close to our swims too.

The tactics we’d decided on were to fish small stick mixes of groundbait and pellets and 8-10mm plastic Nash Mutant hookbaits. Dean and I fished up towards the base of the island margins with one rod each and then to fish our other rods to the edge of the large weeds beds.

This proved to be somewhat less successful than we’d hoped and Dean had a torrid time with his weed fished rod…..just about every take he had weeded him totally solid and ended in lost tackle!

Pete lands a nice mirror

Very frustrating really as he was fishing very tight lines which meant he received a lot less action than he would have liked.

The whole problem was though, that if the bait wasn’t presented with in inches of the weed then you just wouldn’t get any action at all. So this left little options other than to fish bolt up tight and sit on the rods!

Peter Roche with the biggest of the day!

Peter arrived around 11am and decided he’d tackle the fish off the top with floaters. This also proved to be very frustrating as the carp were incredibly cagey, which we couldn’t understand really as they appeared to be fairly new young fish which we assumed would take pretty much anything we threw at them! Pete did manage a few though including the biggest of the day.

My approach was similar to that of Deans, but i opted to fish a little less tight and keeping the line pinned down with heavy rig tubing.

The weed was incredibly thick, strong and stranded. This meant that if you took a little more than a second or two to reach your rod then you would end up losing both fish and tackle. Something that nobody likes doing!

Dean playing one out on a bottom bait

This was needless to say a little frustrating for us all yet not as much as was the overall size of the fish we caught! The original stock of pretty double figure carp were all bar gone and had been replaced by much small fish which was rather a shame.

We could only deduce from it that the owners had decided to take out the majority of better fish and placed them into their new home of the up and coming new ‘Lodge Lake’ soon to be opened to the general public.

All the same, we did have a good day out, with a stack of sunshine, good banter and even a few fish too. Total for the day was 11 between the three of us. Around half taken off the bottom and the rest falling to surface baits.

A pretty mirror for Dean

The one thing that I personally was disappointed in was the lack of people using unhooking mats…..there were to many of the anglers just placing the hooked fish straight onto the hard ground with little or no care for the well being of the fish. Something I think the management could have possible got a bit stricter on???

Keith Supple with a small mirror taken on a bottom bait set up

Anyway, all in all a good day out and something we intend to do more of this year, time and weather providing! I’m back off out soon to the banks of a new syndicate water that i joined in January.

This has also been very frustrating too. After 18 nights on there i still have nothing to show for my efforts. Something I intend to change very soon!

Tight lines all

Keith