I arrived at the pond around 6:45 to find no one there - what a shock!
I wasn't disappointed as this of course as it gave me first choice of swims. The favourite onon the venue is the one where the stream enters the pond. It's the furthest walk from car park albeit some 50 yards!
This is a view of the pond looking from my peg.
Even though I was on an end peg I still had 3 lines to attack at various points during the day. The first was directly in front of me. This I used for most of the day. The second and third were to my immediate right and left but these I wouldn't touch until later on in the day as the water was very shallow (about a foot). I did however know that from prior experience the bigger fish would arrive in there sooner rather than later.
This is the swim 1.
The pond is predominantely all carp, some to about low doubles I believe. There are some silver fish present, roach,bream and crucians. There is supposed to be one tench but I've never caught it.
Tackle and bait wise it was the usual starting point. One large ball into swim 1 and then a few hemps seeds per cast. A single maggot on the hook.
Initial response was good - some nice roach in the 4 to 6 ounce range. After an hour I tried the scopex flavoured sweetcorn but nothing doing. I tried bread as well during the morning to see if I could coax a better stamp of fish out but to no avail.
Around 9am two other people turned up, the first promptly asked for my membership card and the second turned out to the chairman who had put me on to this swim in the first place. Anyway they stayed to about 2 in the afternoon, when they left for their dinner!
Finally I did manage to catch a small carp of a pound around lunchtime which cheered me up somewhat.
I did catch a crucian and a mate wanted to know what one looked like. Here it is.
By 3 in the afternoon I decided a change in tactics had to be made. In came the float rod to be replaced by my feeder rod. A change of line strength as well, 5lb mainline changed to 6lb (the free invisible red line from the Angling Times). No feeder required as I was going to freeline meat underneath the bushes and in the margins, something that had worked for me before.
I fed swim 2 with a few cubes of meat while I continued setting up. The swim is barely a foot deep so quiet and a certain degree of stealth was necessary. I flicked the meat out into stream cuurent about 2 metres inside the pond and laid the rod down with the tip a few inches above the water. Less than a minute later the tip shot round. I struck and the fish spat the hook. Such was the force that my line shot up into the nearest tree! One hook down. Here is swim 2.
That swim was now dead so same tactics but this time into the swim on my left. Depth roughly the same except that it was underneath a tree. This time it was a good 10 minutes before the tip went round. Off the fish shot to the far side of the pond where it spat the hook.
I altenated between the 2 swims for the rest of the day. I did manage to catch a couple of 3 pounders using this approach but to be honest I've had better days there. I did manage a total of 23 fish by the end of the day.
I shall be back later in the summer to better my performance that's for sure.
Tight Lines
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