Bigger baits, less fish, no PB but a beauty of a fish after outsmarting him.

A return to White Springs and yet another common carp PB for Wil.

A new year and a new venue. White Springs Fishery as an experiment. Not all went well .

Near the beginning of our fishing year, we set ourselves a target of a ten pound carp. I had scraped in with ten pounds four ounces, but Wil was stuck on 9.5 lb. Until the very last day.

Fishing for carp under ten pounds is exciting if you are fishing on a pole. To have increasing weights of five commons, up to ten-and-a-half pound really made my day.

With the old and the new Environment Agency licenses, we were both fully covered for the upcoming year and both with concessions. Wil was still under sixteen so his license didn’t cost anything, mine was around twenty-four pounds, the concession being for age and also for being a blue-badge car parking holder, for some reason. Items arrived and even more items were ordered. We had no boilies, so I sent for a bag of Maltby’s Store Scopex Boilies and made up a couple of dry bags using them. My idea here was, whichever pond we ended up fishing on next, we would underarm cast in front of us some two rod lengths, around twenty-five feet, groundbait the area heavily, and to loose feed that area with pellets on top of my dry bag and Wil’s method feeder. We would build up a well baited area that way and when my couple of dry bags were spent, I intended to revert to a method feeder, on the same spot, with either a boilie or a pop up on the feeder. Dry bags had been beefed up now and bands chang