After the glorious weather of the preceeding Sunday I decided to use my club concession again at Stubpond. £1 a day ticket for members of South Norwood Angling Club. Not a bad deal as a normal day ticket price is a tenner!
Traffic wasn't too bad yesterday so I managed to arrive at the fishery just after opening, around 8 am or so. Unloaded the car and selected my swim just as the bailiff come round after a clearing up litter exercise. Had a brief chat, paid my money and then preceeded to tackle up.
Here is my swim - I intended to fish at the from the middle of the reed bed to the furthest tip because the weather conditions were totally against fishing the island using a rod and waggler set up. This was taken at 9am in terms of the wind, it was the best time of the day.
The previous outing I had used my 13ft match rod, 4lb main line and size 18 to 3lb hook for the silver fish but with the arrival of the carp I'd had to increase the hook size to 14 via 16. This time I decided to use my 12ft commercial carp float rod, 4lb main line and size 16 hook to start with. I still intended to target the silver fish early on as I didn't think the carp would arrive until the water temprature had risen a bit. For bait I started on a single maggot. I groundbaited the swim every hour with a ball of brown crumb and groundbait mix with some sweetcorn and the odd cube of meat plus a handful of hemp whilst feeding a few maggots every cast.
Now at Stubpond there is this pride (!) of wild cats who keep creeping up on unsuspecting anglers like something out of the Omen!
This was taken at 9:30 - there are normally about 6 of them. Sorry about the quality of the photo.
Around 10:30 this strange fellow turned up. According to the experts on the Maggotdrowning.com forum it's a carp hybrid of some sort (possibly carrying spawn possibly not), a brown goldfish or even a cross between a rudd and a crucian. Make your own mind up I think. Nice size fish though.
Around midday I switched from maggot to a small piece of meat. At 12:40 this lovely 2lb perch came to the net! I was gobsmacked - I'd never seen a perch this big, let alone caught one. This made the whole trip worthwhile. I was pleased as punch.
Meat and sweetcorn were now the baits to use, so I moved up to a size 14 and caught carp steadily for the rest of the afternoon. At 15:20 I landed this lovely crucian on sweetcorn.
At 4 o'clock the heavens opened and that signalled the end for me. All in all I caught 23 fish, roach, rudd, personal best perch, crucian, common and mirror carp plus a mysterious zoo creature so I think I can put that down a successful day out especially for March.
I wish I could have some photos of me holding the fish but that is one of the drawbacks of having the lake to yourself!
Tight lines.
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