The Tuesday between Christmas and New Year looked okay but cold so we ventured out to Warren Mill with minimal gear and were right to not take too much with us. On arrival and looking over the car park wall, it was obvious that the first half of the mill pond was frozen over. On the right-hand side of the pond, from the ice to the island each peg was occupied by families out to get fresh air, or maybe use new fishing equipment they’d had for Christmas. We walked up to the island and cast, underarm, our huge method feeders some fifteen feet into the area between the bank and the island, with no expectations. When Bampa got bored, he went for a walk to see how far around the island you could get, and on returning he told me this. “Up ahead there’s a bridge across another stream coming into the pond, and after that it’s boggy and you need wellies. After that it becomes difficult and you have to duck under fallen trees before getting to the place where I stopped. I stopped because the path

Background: I fished as a lad, coarse and sea, then, having a teenage grandson who wanted to fish, and in my seventies, I joined him. We lure fished, then we beach-casted, then we coarse fished for silvers, and ultimately found our niche in carp fishing by method feeder and pole in local ponds. Each time we swapped genres of angling, we researched and followed the crowd. This threw up a number of questions that remain to us, unanswered, and we wonder why the following anomalies exist. The strangest thing as far as we are concerned, is the clothing worn by coarse anglers; match anglers, and carp specialists in particular. For reference here, I deem match anglers (and therefore to some extant pleasure anglers, like us) to fish ponds and lakes for all fish, with the match anglers hoping to catch a ten-pound carp at some stage of their match which could boost, or even double, their catch weight. Carp specialists, on the other hand, target carp over twenty pounds and often are not happy unl

Looking for a new carp fishing venue, we found (eventually) Warren Mill and liked what we'd found.

2nd and 3rd December. Wil. Two days of frustrating fishing for Bampa, one day for me to try to understand his frustration. I was tied up with other things on our usual fishing Tuesday, and didn’t find that out until after Bampa had filled the car with our fishing gear. He decided to fish the Tuesday anyway, alone, to leave all the gear in the car overnight, and then we could both fish on Wednesday. Obviously, I wasn’t there on the Tuesday, so this is what Bampa told me on Wednesday morning. “I am getting really frustrated with the type of fishing that I should be doing, and I always seem to pick the wrong one. I’ve been getting nowhere on the pole recently, while you have been catching on the method feeder, so it was obvious to me on Tuesday that I should leave my pole in the garage and take my feeder rods to Dragonfly. I arrived to find the pond looking like a mirror with no signs of a breeze, three anglers on the far side of the pond, spread out, and I didn’t want to fish the opposit

25th November. Between fishing days, we had a week of the weirdest weather with the barometer not knowing what to do so swinging from one side to the other all week. The wind was constantly from the north, most of the time we were in heavy rain, the very West of Wales had snow, and on fishing day we had bright sunshine with hardly a breeze. It was the type of crisp autumn day where coats come off because the sun is on you, but as soon as the sun starts to go down, you reach for the handwarmers. Dragonfly was the obvious pond to try, where fish were larger than on Mallard, but harder to catch. We set up at the northern end of the pond, near the gate on the hill, where we’d fished before and you could load and unload your gear but had to move if anyone came down the single track. Bampa had his pole and sat on his box seat with foot plate with one swim ten metres to his left, in a margin, the other swim in front of him at top kit plus one. The obvious thing was that even after the ground

We knew we hadn’t built up years of experience, but we did have the previous year to go on, so on the Saturday before fishing day we delved into our first book “Newbie Anglers,” to see what conditions were like, this time last year. It had rained at Hazel Court on that day, a year ago, and we fished on a peg that was pure mud (since rebuilt with timber piles and levelled out) but we had caught five or six carp of around the six pound mark and some big bream, including personal bests for bream at the time for both of us. The surprise to both of us, on reading back the chapter, was that at that time we only had one rod each. It seemed that every time we walked past the barometer, the pressure had dropped, as a low came in to cover the country and the forecast for this coming Tuesday was for rain showers. It rained heavily on the Sunday, the ComiCon day, where Gandalf’s hair and Spider-Man’s costume both got wet in the queue to get into the venue, then we spent a shedload of money on book