I was up at 5 and out of the house at 6 to make the hour long journey to the fishery in Haywards Heath.
On arrival I made my way straight to the lake. No one else was there (big surprise) so I grabbed the same swim as I'd caught my double in. I didn't expect to catch it again but hey you never know.
I chose to have the same setup as before, however I had to use another float as the dog ate my new lucky one!
I normally take some maggots as feed not as hook bait as I don't want to be plagued by small roach etc however as I hadn't seen any roach or rudd on my previous visits I decided to start with maggots.
I put on a red one and flicked the float out to where I had groundbaited. Less than five mintes later the float disppearred and I was into a good fish. Unlike last time when I lost a good fish early on this time I managed to get it into the net. A nice 6.5lb common.
Next cast, again on maggot a 2lb'er made the net. I decided to give the whole of the first hour to maggots just to gauge the results. I did catch fish but all were around the pound mark.
After the first hour I switched back to strawberry corn but the larger fish kept away and I only managed F1s and commons around the pound mark. These were not coming in thick and fast although I could see signs that the fish were there.
The fishing continued to be slow for the remainder of the morning. By now I had been joined on the lake by a few other anglers. A solitary man 80 yards or so to my left and a man with four teenagers just around the corner from me.
The lads were far enough away from me and to be honest they were quiet so I can't honestly say they were disturbing the fishing. They did however disturb my concentration because they were forever changing swims seemingly every few minutes in the hope of catching a fish. Lucky for me they only lasted until 2:30 when they had obviously got bored and decided to leave.
After they left I managed to regain my composure and the fish started to come again. One thing that I did notice that was different from last time was that the fish were on average slightly larger. I wasn't getting many of the half pound and less carp but these were nearly all between 3/4lb and 2lb.
At three in the afternoon still with almost a tin of unused meat left I made the decision to switch to meat for the remainder of the day. Initial response was slow but I perserved with it in the belief that it would ultimately prove successful.
When I did catch the carp were of a much better quality, the biggest being around 5lb. (See below)
At the end of the day I'd caught 42 fish which wasn't bad. Simon, the bailiff said that maybe the fishing was slower because the water tempreture had dropped by 5 degrees or so.
As I packed up a chap who had been fishing canal lake began to chat to me and he convinced me to give the match lake (canal) a try next time. "It's not easy" he said "but the rewards are quite high".
So that's the plan for my next visit.
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