Anglers Profile

Tuesday 27^th December was quite a mild day and having completed the normal Christmas duties and had a pleasant Christmas I couldn’t resist the opportunity to go fishing and try out some of the new bits of fishing tackle I had acquired, including some new Delkims.

Things being what they are though I didn't get down to the syndicate water I fish until lunchtime since had to drop my son off in the morning and then sort the gear out. When I arrived at the lake some weak sunshine had just disappeared leaving a warmish grey sky and hardly any wind. One of the guys I know on the water, was fishing the peg I have been fishing a lot recently, so I ended up fishing an end peg which I also quite like fishing. He had been there since 8am and hadn't had a thing, not very inspiring but who knows.

A bit about the lake, as I’m calling it, is quite small with only around 30 carp in it and it isn’t an easy water at the best of times. In winter like all carp waters the going gets correspondingly harder. Generally if one gets a single carp in 24 hours it’s a good session, fortunately they are of a decent size around 20lb with 1 known fish over 30lb. Nearly all of the carp I have caught here have been taken on a night, so only fishing the afternoon was more for the pleasure than with a hope of catching.

Since my co-angler had struggled and he is quite a good angler I decided that the way forward was to fish something different to what he was doing. He had advised he was fishing boilies and consequently I decided to fish bright fruit pop-ups over small bags of pellet. If they were going to take a bait it was more likely to be out of curiosity than hunger. Additionally I was probably only going to have 5 hours fishing since as we all know it is dark early, and that would give me 4 hours of daylight and 1 hour in the dark.

I decided to fish 2 rods across to the far bank and 1 rod to the right on the nearside bank up against some lilypads. As quickly as possible I got my rods out fishing and catapulted around 10 boilies to each area, hopefully to attract any passing carps interest that might be feeding and if not hopefully the small bags of pellet with the pop up might attract any inquisitive carp.

I had only had the nearside rod out a couple of hours when around 3.30pm the RH rod fishing on the nearside up against the lilypads was away. Fantastic, I struck and was into a carp and after a spirited fight I ended a long spell of blanks - with one 18.5lb linear carp. The fish looked very nice in its winter colours. What a good way to end the year! I fished on after dark but there was no more action to be had. Wishing tight lines for everyone in 2012.