2012 23 August 9th Nursery Fields, Edenbridge

I thought that as the weather was looking good today I would take advantage and have the afternoon off work to go and land some of the NF carp.

I left work at 12, arrived home about an hour later, packed the car and set off for the fishery. There were a few cars in the car park when I arrived so I pretty confident my favourite carping peg would be free.

I quickly loaded up the trolley before heading out to the top of the lake. Sure enough the peg was empty. Lady luck was on my side today.

I set up both rods exactly the same except for the boille flavour and size. On the left rod it was 10mm monster crab and on the right it was 15mm pineapple frenzy. At 15.00 on the dot I made my first casts.

On my last carping session I had to wait nearly three hours for my first bite, today it was only half that as at 16:30 the crab rod’s buzzer went off and I was into my first fish, a tench of around a pound.

Twenty minutes later, same rod, same result. These tench seem to really love crab. If the carp don’t come out to play I felt sure the tench would keep coming. I was wrong as it turned out.

That was it for the early action. I had to wait an hour before the buzzer went off again. Yet again it was the crab rod, only this time it was one of the lakes barbel that had taken it. Thirty minutes later another one took it. Three hours in, four fish, two tench and two barbel not a bad start.

I had to wait an hour and fifteen minutes for the next take. Yet again it was on the crab rod. It wasn’t a carp but another barbel, they do fight like carp though! Just after I put it back the other rod went off and I was into something a little better. A few minutes later it was on the bank, 2.5lb common carp. Mission accomplished.  

Time was beginning to run out. I had to ensure that by the time I had packed up and returned to the car the light would still be good enough for me to see the padlock. To this end I set myself a time of 20:00 to finish fishing.

I was beginning to think about packing up when the pineapple frenzy rod’s buzzer sounded and I was into my biggest fish of the day, a 4lb carp. It was dead on 20:00 when I returned it to the water.

I loaded up the trolley and headed back to the car. There were still another one or two anglers present when I left.

In conclusion, monster crab will catch anything that swims but pineapple will catch the larger ones. So in a way my plan worked a treat!

2012 22 August 5th Nursery Fields, Edenbridge Kent

Today I was determined to get a century of fish after coming within 5 of that total on my last float fishing visit a week or so earlier.

For once the weather seemed to be of the typical summer variety as I left home around 6am for the 30 minute journey to the fishery.

Over the previous few days and on the journey down I decided that I would fish the reed bed on peg 15 which meant that I could fish a feeder to the island so when I got to the lake I was overjoyed to find only one other car there.

I loaded up the trolley and headed out to peg 15. Can you manage my horror when I discovered that the only other angler present had also chosen peg 15! Gobsmacked I walked past him (complete with the evil eye ‘lol’ ) and settled into to peg 7.

With all plans for peg 15 banished I mixed up a generous helping of ground bait. When it was ready I fed two large balls together with a lot of hemp and a mixture of maggots and casters. With that exercise complete I proceeded to set up my two rods.

The first was the waggler rod. As I was planning to use maggots for the bulk of the session I used a very small 2bb float to a size 18 hook on 5lb main line. The feeder rod had a small cage feeder to a size 14 on 6lb main line. Next I set the peg up so that everything was easily accessible and anything I wouldn’t need all the time was put away in the box. I was still wary of the rain!

I made my first casts at 8:09. Now if you have read any of my previous posts you will have realised I’m sure that I don’t very often break with tradition however today I did. I had decided that instead of feeding maggots every cast I would feed some Nash scopex feed pellets.

The plan seemed to work as almost immediately I was into fish. They weren’t huge but they were swimming so they all count! I normally pack up around 6pm when I’m doing an all day session so using my analytical skills I calculated that I would need 10 an hour to reach the magic ton.

How do I count them I hear you ask? Well each species is allocated a piece of bait (corn, meat etc) and then every hour or when the species caught outnumbers the bait I log the total and start again.

As I stated previously the fish were coming in thick and fast so by 8.56 I’d caught perch, gudgeon, crucian carp, roach, rudd, bream and tench for a total of 16 fish. A promising enough start to the session.

I couldn’t relax though as I was aware that the swims at NF tend to switch off during the lunch hour. I kept to the plan, maggot on the hook, pellets loose fed every cast and a generous helping of ground bait and hemp every hour.

The next hour yielded perch, gudgeon, crucian carp, roach, rudd and my first barbel of the session for 17 fish making the total 33.

For the next hour I started to experiment with corn every other fish. The catch rate slowed somewhat but I still managed to get perch, gudgeon, roach, rudd and barbel for 13 fish making the total 46.

Between 11 and 12 the bites began to dry up although I have to say I was beginning to favour the corn.  Into the net went some crucians, rudd, bream and barbel for 7 fish. The total was now 53 over halfway with six fishing hours to go. Some of the bream were quite good:

I decided as the fishing was slowing down to take a break and have my lunch. Even so I still managed in the next hour to get another crucian and four more bream. At lunch as the cricketers say the score was now 58.

After the lunch period I decided that if I wanted to hit the magic century I would have to switch back to maggots. For the next hour or so I did precisely that. I was rewarded with thirteen fish. Five of them roach. The total had moved on to 71.

Perhaps I was getting a bit over confident because during the mid-afternoon period I only managed three fish, a solitary barbel and a couple of tench. It was now 3pm and the total was 74.

The chances of hitting my target were looking pretty slim as the swim was still not producing in the afternoon as it had been in the morning. By 4pm only 4 more fish were caught, although one was a perch, the first for over 4 hours. I was still 22 away from the magic ton.    
 

The previous stated total did not include anything caught on the feeder rod. All through the day I’d been catching one or two an hour on the feeder. They totalled by the end of the session fourteen which comprised of three bream and eleven tench. When these were included the total now stood at 92 with an hour or so to go.

As the evening set in I thought I would alternate the hook bait between meat, corn and maggot. I was pretty confident that I could catch eight fish in the time so I decided to go for a better quality of fish to end the session on.

The maggots still accounted for a couple of rudd but the meat and corn brought in some good tench and three of the larger barbell. I had ten in total by the end of the session, which meant that I finished the day on 102. The objective had been met!

This is fish number 100.

As I drove home I reflected on what a great day’s fishing I’d had.

2012 21 July 27th Nursery Fields, Edenbridge, Kent

Today the weather was so good that I decided to leave work at noon to go home and get my carp gear out before heading to Nursery Fields in Edenbridge.

My intention today was to fish peg 17 at the top of the fishery. I like this peg simply for the reason that it is the shortest cast distance to the island of all the pegs which means that I can use a small bomb and hand feed rather than use a feeder.

I left the house about 2pm for the thirty minute journey to the fishery. When I arrived there were about 10 cars in the car park. Undeterred I loaded up the trolley and headed off up the lake. When I got to the top someone else was in my swim! I couldn’t believe it I’d never seen another person in that swim before. Anyway I carried on round the lake and settled for peg 15.

Today was quite a warm day and I was already beginning to feel the effects of it when I started to set up which is why I was totally gutted to discover that I had inadvertently left my rod pod in the garage. I started to panic but managed to calm myself down enough to review my options.

I emptied my rod rest section of my holdall and after a few adjustments I managed to set 4 of them up to use as a substitute pod. The only drawback being that I had to have one rod each side of the swim with my chair in the middle.

Now I had the set up sorted I baited up my two chosen swims, the first on the left was only 3 rod lengths away and 2 out from the reed bed, the second was about two thirds of the way to the island straight in front me. On the first rod I fished 10ml monster crab boillies and on the other I used 15ml pineapple frenzy ones.

I made my first cast at 15:22 and then sat back with a bottle of coke and my kindle to wait for the action to start. My plan was to recast and to top up the feed every hour.

I don’t know if it was the heat of the day or my poor angling skills but I never got a sniff as the time first went past 4 and then five and then 6 and then 7 until at 19:10 the buzzer went off on the monster crab rod and I was into what turned out to be a 4lb mirror carp.

I was now off and running, eighteen minutes later a tench took the monster crab boillie. Not to be outdone a common carp of around 2lb took the pineapple boillie on offer. Just after I cast out, the crab rod went off again and in came another tench.

I began to feel that the swims were really coming to life however I was now becoming concerned that the light was going to beat me. Just after 8pm the buzzer on the pineapple rod went off and I was into my biggest fish of the day, a 6.5lb common.

The last fish of the day came on the crab rod and was another tench. This came in as I was packing up at 8.36.

In conclusion I caught six fish in 90 minutes which is it had continued across the whole session would have been fabulous however bearing in mind the disaster that could have been thanks to the forgotten rod pod I was happy enough

2012 20 July 20th Nursery Fields, Edenbridge, Kent

I took another Friday off from work with a plan to restore my fishing mojo which I think I’d lost five days earlier on peg 2!

I arrived at the fishery just before seven am to find the car park empty which of course meant that I would have first choice of peg.

I started walking around the bottom of the lake in ascending peg order. As the back straight starts there are some fine fishy looking pegs. Today I opted for peg 7 which for me is the perfect NF peg. It has a bed of lilies quite close in to fish to (although they are on the left of the peg) and another set on the far bank where you can drop a feeder close to.

I mixed up the usual amount of ground bait, brown crumb mixed in with samples of hook bait and fed the waggler swim heavily. I also threw in a large proportion of my freshly cooked hemp and a couple of handfuls of maggots. Next I set up the two rods.

As usual for NF I set up the float rod with as small a waggler as possible which in this case was a 2bb one and a size 18 hook on 2.5lb breaking strain hook length. The only concession to the larger carp in the water was the 5lb main line. The feeder rod I set up with a size 14 hook to 6lb hook length and main line and a small cage feeder. For bait I intended using 10ml monster crab boillies.

For the float rod I intended to start with until at least lunchtime with maggots. My plan was to keep feed going into the swim catching maybe some small fish in the hope that the continual feeding of the small fish would attract the larger ones. That was the plan anyway.

I made my first casts at 7:45. The float dipped almost straight away and I was into the first of my 14 roach. It wasn’t huge, around an ounce I would say but it was the blank breaker so it was important.

This was quickly followed by a couple of skimmer bream and one of the many small barbel that reside in this lake.

The feeder rod was also seeing some early action with two good (relatively speaking) tench coming to the net in that first hour. The signs were good that today could turn out to be a great day.

One species that you tend to get when solely using maggots is the striped predator, the perch. There are quite a few in NF however I’ve never caught anything over a couple of ounces. Today I caught seven of the little beggars.

The bream seem mostly to be skimmers although you can catch the odd one of around 2lb if you get lucky. Today I caught 8. I did notice that due I suppose to the shallowness of the water some of the skimmers actually jump out of the water in a bold strike out for freedom.

Though when you catch a good one they look absolutely fantastic the norm is that the very small rudd will gobble a maggot down as soon as it hits the water. I tend to have the bulk of the shot down the hook end when using maggots so that the bait drops quickly through the water. Today I still managed to catch eleven of them.

Nursery Field’s barbel seem to come in two sizes, the small ones which can be taken mainly on maggot and corn are about 5 to 7 inches long. The other ones around the 2lb mark. I’ve, like today tended to catch them at the end of the session on meat and sometimes corn. Fiftteen made the net today, two or three were of the latter variety.

My favourite looking fish of them all is the crucian carp. This lake appears to be full of them. I was surprised at how many could be taken on maggot. The larger ones take corn but the bites are harder to hit. By the close of play the virtual net contained seventeen of them.

No description of a session using maggot would be complete without a mention of the mighty gudgeon. You know you are fishing ‘bottom’ when you get these, an organic plummet if you will. Anyway I managed with some effort to land five of these little scrappers.

The last but by no means least of the species that I caught today is the tench. I’ve never seen one over 2lb from here but even so they do put up a decent fight. Four of them came on the waggler rod the remaining thirteen came on the feeder rod.

Sadly today was not a day for the common or mirror carp to put in appearance which was the first of only two negatives coming out of the session. The other was the weather, at around 6pm the heavens opened and I and my equipment got absolutely drenched which forced me when it finally abated to pack up and go home. Before I left I counted the fish I’d caught and the total was 95, five short of the magic ton.

I will return for another crack at the hundred very soon.