The final trips of 2009 – part 1

I’m currently snowed in and work is closed for the day so I’m finally getting around to updating things. In truth there isn’t a lot to talk about as I’ve only been out a couple of times since the last update, to white springs on both occasions.

The first of these was a 24hour trip to in October with Barry. We arrived in the evening and began to set up on the pleasure lake where there were still some people fishing including some kids. Unfortunately these kids weren’t being too well behaved and their guardian wasn’t much better. We put up with the shouting, swearing and clowning around for a bit as we set up until one of them cast right across Barry’s swim from the opposite bank missing him by about a metre. He walked off in disgust and sarcastically commented that “this should be renamed the kindergarten lake”, which I found a bit amusing.

Luckily it wasn’t too much longer before they packed up and left by which time the light was fading. I had heard that the carp went to somewhere around the 20lb mark so I set up with larger carp in mind. Between us we were fishing a couple on the bottom and a couple on the surface. The carp could be heard all over the pool slurping and surfacing and it wasn’t too long before Barry had one on a dog biscuit at about 6lb if I remember correctly.

Not long after he landed another of similar size on a boilie but I think our tactics were overkill for the average size of fish in the pool. I had lots of rod tip knocks and the odd bleep or two but it as a few hours before I actually had a proper take, resulting in a carp about 4lb.

At some point in the night whilst I was asleep Barry switched to float fishing worm (with a starlight). He got a lot of bites and landed a few small carp up to a couple of a pound before getting his head down. In total I think I only managed 3 carp before morning came. We were both in agreement that our tactics were overkill given the average size of fish even thought there might be one or two bigger ones.

In the morning we packed away all the carp equipment and moved to the old canal lake with lighter tackle. Barry was on the opposite bank to me and was float fishing and feeder fishing maggots and worm; I was using a maggot feeder and a method feeder.

Things started slowly and I was trying a few different baits such as pellet, pepperami, sweet corn, and mini boilies. I can’t remember which one of us caught first but I think my first fish was a small carp on pepperami. As the morning progressed our catch rate began to increase by regularly feeding the areas we were fishing. Both of us were getting more bites with maggots so I began using maggots solely and by the afternoon we were each catching almost a fish a cast!

Although I was using two rods things got so hectic at one point that I would hook a fish on one rod whilst re-baiting the other. After landing the fish I would re-cast the one I had just re-baited and so forth. Between us we must have landed a large weight of carp all ranging from 1-5lb or so. We also had a few skimmer bream, roach, and Barry had a 2lb 8oz perch to top things off. So we were delighted with our session on the canal and neither of us wanted to leave!