2015 02 March 13th Private Lake, Holland nr Hurst Green, Surrey

Holland Angling Society closes it's ponds from March 15th until June 1st so today would be my last chance to visit the Private Pond.

I left home around 6:30 for the drive to Oxted. The weather relative to the time of year had been good leading up to today so I wasn't surprised to see that the thermometer in the car read 5 degrees.

When I arrived at the pond there were no other cars there. Strange I thought being so close to the seasons end. I unloaded the car and then had a look around. The top end of the pond is usually covered in lily pads but none as yet had broken the surface.

Peg 8 is my favourite so that was my choice of swim for today. My Set up was a 12 foot match rod, 4 lb main line to a size 20 hook. First line of attack would be single maggot.

I mixed a relatively small amount of ground bait which consisted of brown crumb, red silver fish attractor and hemp. Before I cast in I fed about half a bait box of hemp, a couple of small balls of ground bait and a few handfuls of the maggots I had left over from last week. I made my first cast at 7:45.

I didn't have to wait long for the float to disappear. The culprit was a roach of about an ounce. I fed a few more maggots and re-cast. Yet again the float went away and yet again it was another small roach.

It carried on this way for about 50 minutes. I decided at that time to give sweetcorn a go. Withing 10 minutes I'd caught another roach which brought my total for the first hour to 10.

I followed the same tactics for the second hour and was rewarded with seven roach and the season's first carp (small) and tench (also small) making my total for the day 19. This was six more than last week's grand total.

For hour three I think the pond's head of small carp had bullied the roach away as I didn't manage to catch a single one. I did manage two more small carp on single maggot though.

Sixty minutes later a combination of maggot and corn as bait saw me land a further three small carp. I actually had to use the landing net for the first time this season!

After consuming my Oxtail soup I went straight into the lunchtime session. I landed eight fish, 2 small carp, 3 roach and 2 very nice crucians. My total for the day was now 31.

It was now that I started to hit trouble. The weather was still reasonably clear and dry but the temperature had dropped drastically. I wasn't sure if it would affect the fishing but it did as by 14:00 I'd only caught three more small carp.

During the day I'd been feeding some pellets into the swim and so as the fishing was slow I decided to have a change of tactics. I went for a banded 6 mm pellet set up. I was rewarded almost straight away with another small carp.

By the time I'd packed up at 17:00 I'd landed three more small carp on the pellet.

I finished the day on 38 from four different species. I shall have to return when the pond re-opens in June.