A Summer at the Park - Gaz Fareham

As a rule, us Northern boys have a pretty tough time when it comes to catching big fish. There’s a few up here yes, but ‘few’ is undoubtedly the key word there and when you consider that there are more 40’s in the Wiltshire water I’m fishing at the moment than there are in the whole of the North West it’s no wonder we spend more miles on the motorways than most.

There was a short spell in the late 90’s when a group of lads came together on Redesmere for a couple of seasons. It was slow going but it was always the social that made it bearable and some good friend were made. Since those seasons, everyone either caught what they wanted or had just had enough and drifted off to pastures new. That’s how it’s been since and everyone has been involved in their own campaigns on waters all over the country. Little did we all know that this year was to be a bit different to the norm and there must have been something in the air up North this year because we’ve had some great results between us; virgin upper 30 and 40lb commons, a handful of other 40’s, braces of 40’s, and even a 50. The fish aren’t going to raise any eyebrows on a national scale but when you consider that the venues are generally 3-400 mile round trips the effort involved is massive, I’ve known Charles to make the journey to his Essex syndicate just for a single night. I reckon we’d keep Esso in business between us!

Top of the tree and close to home the highlight of the season has undoubtedly got to be the efforts of Rob and Chris pioneering a big untapped venue ‘somewhere in the north’. They’ve really had to graft and after 3 years of some serious angling they’ve had a number of stunning fish, culminating in two of the best looking commons I’ve ever seen. At 38 and 40lb they were both pristine, virgin creatures and embody everything that is still good about carp angling in this country. Big, big well done boys because I know just how hard you had to work for them.

Heading South down the motorway, Gav bagging the Jockey at 50+ was an awesome result in itself but following it up with the Brute at 43 a few weeks later just put the proverbial icing on the cake. Tim Bottomley’s brace of very desirable whackers from the Wiltshire venue was an awesome result; 41 and 46, superb mate, I just wish I’d been on to see it! Andy Wilkins’s 44 mirror from a big very understocked venue down south was another right result and recently adding to the list (2 days ago as I write) Martin Allerton has just had a brace of immaculate home grown 39 pound commons from a very tricky estate lake down south.

Everyone has one or two really close mates who are always on the end of the phone to ‘truly’ congratulate you when you’ve had a result, they know exactly how much it means to you and the effort you’ve put in along the way, Charles is one such mate and I can’t finish without mentioning his recent 40+ mirror, he’d had a nightmare of a season when everyone else had been having it off but the capture of that just redressed the balance somewhat, good angling son!

I finished my last piece with a little story about a Park lake I spent 3 months fishing at the end of last season. Doing ‘the days’ and spending the nights crammed in the back of my Astra estate was all well and good, but when I was waking up to temperatures of -6 and a frozen interior I did start to wonder, especially at 3am on the morning when I had to literally kick my way out as the condensation has frozen the door seals solid! The lake had fished really well up until about New Year with a good number of the bigger residents being caught but a bit of bad timing on my part meant that you could count on one hand the number caught during the time I spent there. I’d been looking at the water for a few years now and when I did finally get round to actually fishing it I managed to coincide with the slowest period for ages, typical! Slow as it was, there’s nothing like a bit of defeat to strengthen the resolve and I vowed to come back and ‘learn ‘em’ the following season.

Even though I didn’t actually even see a carp during that period I still learnt an awful lot about the venue. All those important little things like where the big fish have been caught from in the past, where they show (when they do!), which swims cover which water, what baits have been going in, where the safest place to park my car was, which was the best Kebab from the van, how to avoid getting my gear nicked…

I made a few recce visits to the venue during the close season and just spent a bit of time walking and watching. There are a couple of spots you can find them in the warmer months on a nice day and watching big thirties and forties troughing down bait a few feet from me really was a sight to behold, they’d send up big deep vortexes as they flanked and twisted and occasionally would rise up level out of the cloud, gills going as they chewed on mouthfuls of my 18’s! An awesome sight and one that had me well and truly fired up, after a hard winter and losing what felt like a good fish I was keener than ever to see one of them on the bank, perched there with my Polaroid’s on and half a dozen carp feeding below me those long winter nights in my car were well and truly forgotten and seemed a lifetime ago.

I’d been trying to get hold of a night ticket for a couple of seasons but I was well prepared to do it on the days if I really had to. When the long awaited letter dropped through the door in April I was more than a bit disappointed to find it was just a renewal form for my day permit, hmmm…days it was then! I came up with all the possible plusses for just fishing the days I could think of and convinced myself I could use it to my advantage, it would certainly suit my mobile approach anyway. The lake is a funny one with regards to the times of fish captures and you can roughly split it down the middle, they get caught from one end during the day, and the other at night. Oddly though it is the deeper end that produces during the day, even in the summer and some of the lads with night tickets still make the move from one end to the other every day. In some respects I felt this could make my fishing a little easier; because the water tends to be quite coloured, the fish are impossible find in all but a couple of areas and actual ‘shows’ are all you really have to go on most of the time. At over 50 acres it’s a fair piece of water so mentally splitting it into two and focussing on just one half would hopefully make the location problem a bit simpler. The plan was to get to know and concentrate on 3 or 4 of the main swims in the ‘bowl’ that had a history of producing the big fish, covered a lot of water and could also capitalize on a few different weather conditions.

As for everything else I planned to keep that as simple as possible too. I was aware that the bream shoals could be a big problem during the summer so 18/20 mil Fusion boilies would be my attack with not a pellet or particle anywhere in sight, baiting up would be done with a catty and stick, bliss! Big 20-30mm hookbaits were rolled with a percentage of cork dust to give them a small amount of buoyancy and they were then air-dried and soaked up. Rigs were to be kept really basic too and the ever faithful size 6 Wide Gape’s with a curved shrink extension attached to a 6-8”link was all I felt I would need with a big spread of 18’s and the big hookbaits. There was nothing more to it, that was my entire thinking in terms of bait, application and presentation, all I had to do was find ‘em!

I gave the first few weeks of the season a miss deciding to let the pressure die down a little and it was early July when I made my first visit. I turned up late evening so I could have a good look around and hopefully see something to give me a clue for the next morning. As it happens it was quite busy and there were no free swims in the bowl end at all. I had a walk and a chat and from what I could gather no one had seen or caught anything and after watching until quite late I was still none the wiser. After spending a couple of hours in the car I was up and pushing around well before light. It was flat calm and I watched in the pre-dawn twilight for an hour or so down the bowl. Seeing nothing I pushed on finding Mike Willmott ensconced in the bay and he relayed the weekend’s incidents, none of which were really carp related! Mainly it was about the bins being set alight by the rampaging youths and the lads down the bowl getting grief and drunken abuse, nice. Anyway back to the carp…he had seen an odd one and was leaving that morning so I opted to fish a little swim tucked away in the trees to the right which covered quite a bit of water and gave me a good view of the southern half of the lake. With the promise of a nice wet south westerly arriving the next morning on a hunch I decided to give them a bit of bait, an hour later my hands were sore and 5k of 18’s had been deposited at the base of the firmer ground. Nothing at all happened that day and I didn’t see anything either but next morning I couldn’t keep all 3 rods in the water. Bream after bream, after bream, after bream, so much for the 18’s…I was going to run out of hooks at this rate! The weather arrived as predicted for a change and brought some heavy cloud and fine drizzle with it, it really did look spot on and while I was out unhooking another slab, a carp pushed its bulky head and shoulders out about 20 yards behind the bait, followed by another one a few minutes later. I quickly repositioned two of my rods, moving one onto the back edge of the bait and the other 20 yards behind it on the spot they’d shown thinking they might have been hanging back while the bream demolished everything.

I didn’t see any more carp and by about 2 o’clock the rain had cleared, the weather was looking less carpy by the minute but at least the bream had relented. They’d actually been passing the bait as I’d been unhooking them and there’d been liquid Fusion everywhere. I could just imagine a vast shoal of them 30 yards wide in a frenzy mopping up everything in sight and then crapping it all straight back out, the red cloud getting bigger like a scene from a piranha attack!

The rest of the day was spent tying rigs and then at about half 5 the one rod I’d left on the bait was away. After all the bream the power was a bit of a shock and it ran me ragged taking 30-40 yards on a few occasions, the first bite of the season is always a bit nervy, especially with the lost one at the end last season, and all I wanted was for it to be in the bottom of my net. Eventually it was, and soon I was knelt down looking down at a solid set of deep, bluey grey shoulders. It looked for all the world a nice 30, it certainly had the frame and is at the right time of year I was told, but having recently spawned turned out to be just under at 29.08. Still, it was a lovely start though and I was buzzing to have bagged one on my first trip. I baited really heavily before dark and next morning had another off the area shortly after casting out, this time a mirror just under 20. Later that morning the wind got up again and the white caps were hacking past me down to the bowl end, I knew that a few of the anglers down there had left so I took a chance and moved on it, spending another couple of days down there. I did see a couple and think I came close but had no more chances.

At 2.30am 10 days later, I was southbound on the M6 heading back to the Park keen for another crack. Again I’d managed to coincide with the arrival of another big south-westerly and got in right on the end of it down the bowl end this time, I knew where I wanted to be. Stringers and a light scattering of 18’s with the stick were dispatched to nice smooth, firm areas at 30-40 yards and I watched for as long as my eyelids would allow, the long drive and lack of sleep finally getting the better of me by about 9. Later that day one of the regulars Chris turned up and knocked one out from next to me, a particularly lovely mid twenty mirror with huge ‘dinner plate’ sized scales on it’s shoulders. Nothing else happened that day and nothing showed either so I packed up just after dusk and headed up to the van for one of their legendary Chicken kebabs wondering what to do next day, I felt if they’d been on the wind in any numbers we would have seen them or had more action.

The short summer night passed quickly and before I knew I was pushing the barrow along the path in the half-light of dawn again. The wind had eased a little and after standing and watching for a while I finally saw one, right over in the calm on the back of the wind and then another soon after, different fish too. That was all I needed to see and I was off as quick as my legs and barrow could carry me! Little stringers were felt down for a thud and a very light scattering with the stick was out as quick as humanly possible and I sat back on my still loaded barrow to ponder. Barely 10 minutes later I had one in the net, by the look of it a common which might have just scraped 20 but as I’d seen another three show slightly further along in front of a different swim while I’d been playing it I didn’t weigh it and settled for a quick snap and another quick move. I hadn’t even had time to get a brew on yet so once they were out and I was happy in the new swim first thing was to get the kettle on. It wasn’t long before I’d seen another couple head and shoulder and I even had a few liners, right up to the top and then all the way back down. There was obviously a number of big fish in front of me and I had a feeling that it didn’t happen like this very often and at best I’d only get the one day to capitalize on it.

A couple of tense hours passed before the first one rattled off and after a proper scrap a grey, battle scarred mirror a few ounces under 29 was posing for a crowd of intrigued park goers and dog walkers giving all the usual quips of ‘you’ll need a lot of chips to go with that’ or ‘put it back you nasty man, look it’s gasping for breath!’ ho ho. After repositioning the rod with a fresh rig and bait I’d barely had time to sort the swim before it was away again and after a mad half hour fight a long, angry looking common finally slid over the cord. One of the Welsh lads, Merv, had run round from the other bank to give me hand and having a quick peek down into the net he said he thought it looked like one of the very few thirty plus commons that the park holds. The scales confirmed it at 30.04, and looking at its long torpedo shaped frame it was no wonder it had fought so well, tough as old boots these park carp! With the photos done and the circus dispersed I got them all back out in the area and hid away down in the swim hoping for a bit of peace and quiet. It quietened down in the afternoon, the liners dried up and I didn’t see any more, not that I was fussed as I was obviously well chuffed with the result and I just sat back to take it all in and ponder where I’d fish tomorrow. At about 5 o’clock while stood up on the path chatting about the days events I had a single bleep, looking down the bobbin was slowly inching up towards the top, my first thought was that it was another liner as it was ever so slow but instead of stopping and falling back it carried on all the way up to the roller and line started ticking of the clutch. I couldn’t quite believe I was in again and after another typically hard, nervy fight another park carp lay safely in my net, my 4th of the day. It was one of the old originals, a fish called the ‘Blackspot Linear’ and although a little down at 29.14 was immaculate, without a mark on it anywhere. She looked beautiful in the late evening sunshine, the last rays of the day lighting her up like a bar of gold.

The lake was busy and one of the night lads understandably jumped at the opportunity when I offered for him to get in after me at dusk so I left him guarding my kit and nipped up the van to a get us both a kebab and a few beers to celebrate. With fingers covered in chilli sauce and kebabs still in hand one of Chris’s was away, the result being a pretty 26 pound mirror. The fish were obviously still about and as I had another couple of days to play with I needed another option. During the day I’d kept my eye on the area I took the first 20lb common from and had seen an odd one show so decided to put a kilo of bait on a snaggy corner of an island and spread another couple of kilos over a couple of open water spots just a little further up the bank to the right. I didn’t think they would have moved far and the snaggy island area seemed a logical place for a few to be, especially as there’d been no lines out there that day. I sat up for a few hours drinking tea listening to the occasional deep ‘slosh’ and straining to see the rings in the moonlight as they head and shouldered out in the dark before tucking myself away for the night.

The next day was quiet other than Chris losing one in bizarre circumstances. The bird life on the park is horrendous, by far the worst I’ve ever encountered. Chris had a take and on lifting into it had startled a nearby swan that took off and clattered straight through the line he was attached to the carp on! By the time he’d freed the line from the bird the fish had managed to find a snag and done one, nightmare.

I was really confident of a bite off the island spot and I’d even see one right on it, lifting out up to it’s pecs before sinking back almost in slow motion. Only 3ft above my hookbait it just had to having a munch down there. By early evening I’d almost given up hope and was thinking I’d maybe overdone the bait. Just as the sun was beginning to fall I was proved wrong and the island rod that was locked up pulled round tight, after a few seconds of nervous stalemate and some heavy lunges I took a couple of steps backwards, gained a few turns of line and got it away from the dense tangle of roots and branches. It turned out to be a cracking half linear, another really clean, chunky fish going 32.02. I was made up to have gotten another bite from a different spot and still had another day yet. Once again I baited heavily after dark before hiding away for the night and returning just before first light. All three were clipped up and on the spots within minutes but a quiet day passed and it seemed they had finally done the off this time. 7 bites in two trips had shown me the approach was working a treat though and it was definitely worth making the effort to do the days, I was obviously getting something right.

Next trip was a 4-day blank but a week later I was winging my way southbound again dodging trucks on the M6 nodding along to Krug and Dorfmeister. The weather looked good for the bowl and after an unproductive day in the madhouse swim that is the bus stop I saw one in the same area as I’d caught from last time. As soon as it got dark I went around and gave the spot a big portion of bait again. I didn’t put a tight area out there, just a nice big spread of 18’s, 6 at a time in the stick. Next morning I was back and sorted early with little stringers flicked out onto the area just before first light. Dawn brought Chris Moyles and some proper carpy weather with it. By 9 o’clock it was still dark with the low cloud and the air was heavy with that really fine, misty drizzle; ‘drop a dog weather’ as Charles would say! A good fish quietly poked it’s head out on the spot and I was sure it was only a matter of time, I’d had a couple of big liners that had got the heart pounding and there were even little patches of fizz all over the area, it just had to happen, surely? When my phone rang it was no surprise that someone had bagged a good ‘un and Chris had a 41 in the sack and needed a photographer. The last thing I wanted to do was wind in as it was prime bite time but there was no one else about and knew he’d have done the same for me so got them in, donned the waterproofs and legged it around to the bay to do the honours for him. After a quick brew and some excited banter I literally ran all the way back round to my swim and got them on the spots again as quick as I could. I was made up for Chris but had a horrible feeling I might have missed my chance and was concerned about the activity I’d caused by having to rechuck. I put the kettle on and just hoped they’d prove me wrong.

Gaz Fareham