The fishery gates open at 7am however due to roadworks at the end of the M23 I actually arrived at 7:15. It didn't seem to matter though as I was the first person in the fishery.
After I'd paid my money in the honesty box, I unloaded the car and walked to the lake. First thing I noticed was the fish activity on the top, the second, was that for my favourite swim the platform had been moved a couple of yards to the left which made the bay more accessible but which made fishing along the reed bed impossible.
Undeterred I set up my match rod to fish about 3/4s of the way across where the fish seemed to be and my new feeder rod (as I broke the last one) to fish as close to the far bank as I could about 15 metres to my left.
I mixed up a generous amount of ground bait with the usual brown crumb plus meat, hemp, maggots and corn. Next I threw in three large balls directly over the area where I saw the fish movement. On the leger set up I decided today to use 15mm pineapple boillies so I threw in several free offerings of those and the smaller 10mm variety.
I made my first casts at 8:36. I was using maggot initially on the float rod. Although I caught a carp of about a pound on the first cast it does take me a while to get myself sorted and in some kind of a rhythm which goes some way to explaining why I only caught three carp in the first hour when it should have been more.
For the second hour I switched to corn however although I was getting bites I just couldn't hook them. It wasn't a completely barren hour though as I got a carp on the feeder rod. Not a large one, around 2lb I would say.
I changed back to single maggot and immediately started to hit the bites. I caught 3 carp and a solitary bream in that hour however it could have been more but for the buzzer going off 3 times and me having to move to land three nice carp.
The hour before my lunch was just as quiet as I switched back to corn. I netted three more carp plus another nice one on the leger rod.
I decided it was time for a break so I poured myself a cup of tea to go with a few small sausage rolls, savoury eggs and some cocktail sausages. As luck would have it I dropped a cocktail sausage and was about to bin it when I thought "would carp like this?" So I took a bit off the end, threaded the hook through it and cast out. Less than 2 minutes later the float went and in came another carp.
In the afternoon I decided to retire the maggots and concentrate on the larger hook baits. As before I started on the corn. Four more carp came in on the con plus one on the leger rig.
The photo below shows a typical carp that I was catching, it wasn't the biggest nor the smallest.
The time was now 14:30 and so I decided the time was right to give the meat a go. Instead of loose feeding corn I began to feed the meat. Three carp in the next hour fell to these tactics plus another on the pineapple leger rig.
The next hour didn't produce the mad rush on meat that I had expected, it only yielded a further three carp. However all the action came on the leger rig, 5 carp with a taste for pineapple all made the virtual net.
I always take a slice or two of bread with me just in case everything else fails. I'm not keen on using it when the swim is full of small roach as the real bites are hard to see. Anyway for the last 90 minutes of the day I thought I would give it a go. It turned out to be an amazing decision as with just one slice of bread I caught 18 carp! Oh, and I still had time to land another one on the feeder rod.
As I packed up I had a quick count of the day's catch, 51 fish, consisting of 50 carp between 0.5lb and 4lb (13 of them on the pineapple boillie) and a lone bream. The previous week I'd caught 113 fish at Gabriels but weight wise this haul had that well beaten.
On the downside the field of llamas had been replaced by horses!
Just before I left I went over to Canal Lake, the fishery's premier match lake. With pegs on just one side it is designed definitely for the pole man but peg 1 as you enter has a lot of water to the right of it that contains some lillies. I didn't see any fish movement but it still made me decide to try it next time I visit.
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