None for ages then 3 come at once!

 Over the 'closed season' with only a limited number of waters open for fishing I have not been able to do a great deal of time on the bank and whilst I have done a bit of beachcasting, float making and some work parties on Fordwich Lake; none of it has really been blog-worthy, until today...

I don't intend to use this blog to continuously promote brands but I must share that I have become a field tester for Big Carp Baits, who are a Hungarian bait company, very successful on the continent and are intending to launch in the uk after their products have been sufficiently tested. I feel privileged to have been selected to help them with this process and know that it will make a big impact on my angling.

Pump Lake, Littlebourne 
I arrived at Littlebourne Lakes just after 7pm on Friday and Birch Lake, where I had hoped to fish, was chocca-bloc so I made my way over to Pump Lake. This water has a boilie ban so I decided to test BCB's Frankfurter Sausage 'wickend' pellets and method mix which comes with an amino syrup and CSL liquer to add to the groundbait.

The business end - tipped off with a single grain of maize.

I was fishing by 8pm and had my first fish by 9pm - a mirror of 7lb 4oz. While light was good I cast to the overhanging trees on the far bank but after sunset I fished right beneath the rod tips. Looking at the decorations on said trees, it is a shame other anglers aren't so mindful.
The margins produced well for me with 3 other carp - the biggest being an 8lb 10oz mirror.
At first light I had a tench of just over 3lb and then 2 more soon after - the best was 3lb 12oz...

It seemed a little slow for this lake but I was overjoyed to be catching. However, by 8am having had virtually no sleep I decided to call it a day...

Stonar Lake, Sandwich

 After a few errands and a couple of hours kip on the sofa it was time to head back out. It is rare I get a whole weekend to fish so I had to make the most of it. I wanted to test boilies this time and hopefully get into some bigger fish so I headed over to Stonar Lake in Sandwich. Conditions here could not have been much different to Littlebourne! A very strong North-Easterly wind was racing across the lake turning it into a very choppy sea! I positioned myself on the south bank with the wind coming straight at me. I baited up a little bay to my left and the margin to my right, just over where it drops off deeper.
I cannot pretend to have been comfortable in this swim and I really don't like to be stuck under the shelter, I prefer to watch the water but the wind was so cold I decided to cut my losses and get some more shuteye after some grub!

I used mixed crushed boilies, maize and salt in solid PVA bags

Spicy 20mm with Frankfurter Popup 

As well as the spicy/ frankfurter snowman rig above, I also fished with Red plum and GLM boilies but it was the former combination that came up with the goods on this occasion. At midnight a small bream foul hooked itself, inconveniencing the pair of us. Undeterred, I cast back out, this time with a long PVA stringer of 20mm baits to avoid bream who were clearly mopping up my crushed offerings.
Just before 4am my alarm screamed off and ripped the rod off the pod (I think it's time to invest in some snag ears!). After a cracking fight I thought my luck was in but as it came to the net I was surprised to see a small common - built like a torpedo with a massive paddle!

7lb bang on

Again it went quiet. After lunch I reeled in and went to speak to some other anglers who had been down for a few days. A few fish had been had but spread out throughout the week so I packed up and went to my final stop of the weekend:

Fordwich Lake!

Fordwich, being an SSSI and RAMSAR site has to observe the traditional closed season. During this time I have taken part in a number of work parties which have earned me the privilege of a guaranteed swim on the first day of the season. As I now know where I am going to be fishing, I am able to bait the spot in anticipation of some unsuspecting carp on June 16th.
I can reach an island and 2 sets of lily pads positioned over a gravel bar within an underarm cast here - this, with carp topping every where, even today, is my idea of heaven! Roll on june 16th....

A good start to the year!

Although today was not my first trip of the year, until now I had not been able to dedicate more than an hour or two at a time to my fishing since Christmas, mostly due to work. However this week I 'm not complaining about being a secondary school teacher as it's half term and I'm making the most of it!

After considerable debate with myself about where to fish I settled on Littlebourne following the advice of some friends on a fishing forum. As the sun came up over Birch lake this morning I made my first casts, sat back and appreciated my surroundings whilst waiting for my first bite.

First fish of the year: 3lb 14oz Tench!

I started off with one rod fishing maize in the margin and one on pellet mid-water over some lilies which have died back for the winter. It was this rod that went first at about 10am. The take was strange, shaky and intermittent. This tench was the result, hopefully I will see a few more of these this year!

After the rod in the margin had been sat there stationary for a few hours I brought it back in an changed the bait to luncheon meat. This was clearly a good move as 30 minutes after I recast it went screaming off with this 14lb 10oz common carp!

Mid afternoon the same rod went off again, same bait, same spot. This time a 14lb 7oz mirror carp.

As I was returning the mirror to the water it hung around in the recovery sling long enough for me to get my phone out of my pocket and capture it swimming off safely.

After that it went quiet and got very cold! I decided to quit while I was ahead as in the past I have gone on to ruin it with a funny five minutes or even as I call it 'happy hour' where one bad decision or rushed action follows another and ends up with poor casts, spooked fish or even lost tackle. Today this was not going to happen. Everything had gone perfectly and that is how I will remember it!

A Fordwich First!!!

Following my last blog, Fordwich Frustration, I made several trips to try and catch my first Fordwich carp. Every time I fish I am learning all the time, always on the look out for fish movement, observing how that corresponds with the conditions and also take note of my own strengths and weaknesses. Over the last couple of trips instead of beating myself up about my incapability to cast particularly far I have chosen swims which a) face the wind and b) have features within my reach.
Today the wind was blowing up towards the part of the lake known as 'the deeps' and the swim known as 'dungees' fitted this description. I still found making the far bank features a little ambitious but first cast on each rod landed on the money. I only fish two rods, one was placed tight to the far bank lilies and the other between the lilies and a dead sunken tree.

The dungees

My choice of rig was a snowman combi-rig attached to a helicopter setup. There was logic behind all of these choices: when using small / standard size baits I have ended up catching bream which when not your objective can be frustrating. So the snowman solves this issue thanks to its sheer size whilst also being 'balanced' and slow sinking so I could be confident it would sit nicely above the silty bottom. The helicopter rig is simple, almost tangle free but most important of all, casts better than any other setup.

Snowman combi-rig/ helicopter rig

I put about 1kg of 20mm boilies across the two locations with a throwing stick and then settled down for the night. At 4am I was woken up by the sound of my alarm screaming at me and the rod I had cast to the lilies was bending round. The fight was strange as after I turned the fish from the snags it swam towards me until it was almost at the net so I found myself winding in frantically! However, when I submerged the net the fish made a valiant bolt away in a bid for freedom. After a short scrap the net was lifted and I was grinning from ear to ear! It didn't matter that this was not a huge fish, what mattered was that after 3 years of trying to crack Fordwich I had finally done it! I now regret making an effort to hide my ecstasy when posing for the photo. 

10lb 7oz - Not a 'monster' but an achievement!

When it was light enough for me to see what I was doing I repositioned both rods on the lilies and put out more bait with the stick. At 7am the same rod screamed off again. As I picked it up I was taken with how much more power this fish had than the last. I had to bully it away from the lilies which resulted in something of a tug of war. Normally in this situation I would give line but could not as I didn't want to loose the fish in the snags. Suddenly the fish came up high in the water and leaped out. As it made contact once more with the surface of the water I could no longer feel any resistance - it had beaten me!

Again, I was quick to get the rods back out and bait up but this time a large flock of gulls and terns took every boilie I threw in. I tried waiting until they went away but one always kept look-out and squawked to alert the others whenever I so much as picked up my throwing stick! Then tiredness and frustration started to kick in - I made a few duff casts and got a bit grumpy. I can't seem to cast so far with pva sticks or bags and I didn't have a spod with me so had no way of getting the bait out with out it being intercepted. So I decided to be wise and quit while was ahead. I am over the moon that I seem to have sussed out a way for me to be successful at Fordwich and banked my first carp from this tough water at long last!