1st May - Mill Lake - Stubpond Revisited

Summer's here, or at least that was what the preceeding few days were telling me as on Friday I headed back to Stubpond for my first session in May.

The car was loaded and ready for the off around 7:10. The sky was clear and I suspected that today was going to be a hot one. An uneventful journey down meant that I arrived around 7:55 to find the gates open early again.

I set up in my favourite swim as there was no one on the lake, if the swim was taken I would have trekked up to the top swims and try my luck there.

The lake was dead calm and the vegatation in the margins and on the far bank was getting greener. Still no real sign of the lily pads though.



I intended to incorporate the same game plan as last time, which was to target the silver fish early until the carp and/or bream moved in. To this end I set up two rods. A light setup on the 13' match rod (size 16 hook with 4lb pound line and a heavier setup on the 12' float rod of size 14 hook and 5lb man line).

I'd watched a Matt Hayes program the other day and he was raving on aboout Scopex as a flavour to mix in with groundbait and/or sweetcorn. I decided to give this a go. The night before my visit I'd flavoured some sweetcorn with Scopex and also flavoured some water so that I could add it to my groundbait mix. I'd also coloured the sweetcorn red.

A large ball of goundbait (brown crumb and an attractor plus a few bits of normal sweetcorn) plus a handful or two of hemp were dispatched at the point where the weeds met open water.

Half a dozen maggots were thrown in with every cast.

The first hour yielded 25 rudd and roach, no monsters but pleasing to see there was life in the swim.

For the second hour I switched to using the Scopes sweetcorn and feeding a few hemp seeds every few minutes on top of the second ball of groundbait. The only real success was a F1 around the pound mark.

I also had a small tench and a few small carp (up to a pound) on the sweetcorn but nothing spectacular.

I alternated tactics btween the sweetcorn and single maggot until two o'clock when I begun to loose feed meat on the chance the carp had woken up and moved in.

As the day wore on it became obvious that the carp were not going to show. I continued to catch roach and rudd on the maggot. Was it the weather? I did see 3 good carp on the surface but by Stubpond standards this wasn't very many.

Anyway towards the end of the day I finally got a bite on the meat - it was this 2lb bream.


So what was wrong? There was a guy 3 or 4 swims along from me fishing the pole to the island and he could only get bites when he switched to paste.

At the end of the day we decided that they must have been spawning. Still I had a great day, I caught 69 fish including, rudd, roach, perch, a single tench, FI, common carp and a good bream.

Tight lines