2012 18 July 1st Private Pond, Oxted, Surrey

Today was the day when I would make my first visit to Holland Angling Society's Private Pond near Oxted in Surrey.

I spent the morning in preparation for the afternoon and evening session. I cooked some hemp and cut the meat. I defrosted the frozen corn and opened a fresh tin. I also chopped some a tin of meat into small cubes.

I set off around 1:30. Even with early afternoon Sunday traffic this meant that I would arrive at about 2pm which would give me a good six hours fishing.

The weather for this summer was not too bad, the sun had been out most of the day but there was still a threat of rain in the air. I thought that the pond would be busy however when I arrived there were only three cars parked on the road. A quick glance to my left showed that Dunks pond had no one on it at all.

I counted five other anglers on the pond none of which were in my three favourite swims. How lucky was that? I unloaded the car (no need for a trolley here) and made my round to peg 8.

You can only use one rod on this pond so today I chose to fish a waggler close to the lilies about 1.5 rod lengths out.

I mixed up my normal concoction of groundbait and when ready fed two large balls into the swim. I also fed some hemp and corn. From my previous session I’d had some maggots left over so I opened the tin only to find that they had all turned into casters. Undeterred I fed those anyway. A lot of them floated and almost immediately eight of the larger carp came to the surface and fed on them.

I decided to use caster from the start as my hook bait and made my first cast at 15:00. The swim was to coin a phrase absolutely boiling with signs of feeding activity therefore it was no surprise when the float dipped straight away and I was into my first fish of the session, a small roach!

My second attempt fared no better so somewhat reluctantly I changed my bait to corn. This pond is full of small carp, the largish being about a pound. By 16:20 I’d caught four of them plus another roach and a solitary rudd.

I fed more groundbait and loose fed corn and hemp on the hour throughout the session. I repeated the caster exercise with the same results. I just couldn’t get through the small stuff even though I knew the larger carp were there. It was very frustrating.

Anyway the next hour brought 5 carp, 3 roach and another single rudd.

It was at this point that I decided to feed the margins swim to my left and right with small cubes of meat. I did this every time I caught a fish.

At 18:00 I switched hook bait to meat and also alternated casts between the three swims. The swim on my left produced small carp and a couple of tench. The swim on the right produced nothing at all. The main action took place in my original swim.

The obvious danger of fishing so close to lilies is that it’s not far for any good sized fish to run. One time the bait hardly had enough time to start to sink before it was taken by something larger than normal. I struck quickly but not quick enough to stop it entering the pads. For what seemed like an age (in reality about 10 minutes) I applied pressure trying to get it out. Somewhat inevitably the five pound line snapped and I lost the fish and all my terminal tackle.

With all my terminal tackle gone I made my mind up to strengthen my approach. I switched from 5lb line to six and upped the hook size from 16 to 14.

I was rewarded 20 minutes later when I hooked into and landed this 6lb common carp.

I carried on until 20:00 but that was the best of the action. By then I had added 11 carp, 3 roach and 2 tench to the net.

In conclusion this was not one of my better sessions. I never really thought I was in the zone, maybe it was because I was never comfortable using my 20 year old 13 foot match rod because I was still waiting for my replacement Shimano section, maybe it was just one of those days.

Wildlife Update:

Can this be termed ‘wildlife update’? I’ll leave you to decide. Anyway the swim I was fishing was quite overgrown and I had to set my rod rest up quite close to the local vegetation. After the session I saw that my hands and arms were covered in bites. At home in the shower I discovered more on my legs. The best though were the two huge ones on my face. I looked like a teenager again for about 5 days afterwards!