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

6th and 7th August. I checked the dates on our Environment Agency licences and could see we were approaching a full first year of fishing that would end on the seventeenth of August. We both had, in that year, caught carp of nine-and-a-half pound and ten-and-a-half-pound so we were satisfied that the first year had gone well. Wil was keen to fish Mallard again on Tuesday and I had no problem with that because I knew that the following day he was flying to Turkey with his sister and father, so I could go out again and the choice would be mine alone. I have been keen, for some time now, to learn bomb and pellet fishing so gave it a go at Mallard while Wil stuck to his pink wafter in method feeders. The connectors were found at the bottom of a box for my fishing seat and I soon had the rod rest (and pole sack) attached at the rear of the seat and the extending multi-rod holder at the front. I tried the system of not clipping up that day, catapulting pellets to an area and then casting to

Wil’s choice of venue today, so we ended up at Jonko’s, Tri-Nant, on Mallard Lake, his favourite fishing spot. Fishing is usually a friendly competition between the two of us, one that Wil inevitably wins, but today we decided on a competition between his tried and trusted pink wafters versus my newly found scopex wafters that had been successful only two days previously at Hazel Court. See the video here. On reaching Mallard it was clear that Thursdays were busier than our usualTuesdays. Anglers were spread around the lake and, as usual, nobody seemed to want the peg under the oak tree, where underarm casting only is available, and you have to look at the wagglers stuck in the trees all day. We set up site after three or four trips each from the car, Wil with his two rods on method feeders, pink wafters, and pink haze over the sticky pellets, me with my two rods on method feeders, each with scopex wafters soaked in scopex bait booster, and with scopex haze over the top of my sticky pe