Mid-March, cold but dry with a slight easterly breeze.

For those that have not read last week’s blog, which is still available, I am at a stage in my angling where I have decided to use my pole, also to be active between swapping swims and feeding them, and to abandon for now the search for larger and larger carp using method feeders or Ronnie rigs and pop-ups. With this in mind, Hazel Court had one of its winter weekends of opening, so on the Sunday I packed the car, headed there, and arrived at eight as the venue was opening.

Around ten cars were in the car park with others arriving as I changed into wellies. There seemed to be a scramble to fill the pegs nearest to cars so I loaded my trolly and made the first of two visits to a peg I’d fished before at the far end of the pleasure pond, where I sat alone all day. In the past, I had not used the trolly and Wil and I had made a couple of journeys each, but with Wil taking a break from fishing to concentrate on his stop-motions, hoping to get employment from them, and with me being seventy-two, the trolly seemed to be the sensible option.

After the first trolly trip, I started making up groundbait so that the bait could soak up the water while I did the second trip and then set everything up, on my second trip I chatted to other anglers. First was an angler who was on his second day of a twenty-four-hour stint, he told me that there were a lot more anglers there on the Sunday than had been on the ponds on the Saturday, he couldn’t understand why, he’d caught two small roach in the two days, and he hadn’t seen many fish being caught from either the specimen pond or the pleasure pond. I reminded him that Saturday had seen two six-nations rugby matches on the TV so maybe that was why Saturday had been low in numbers. (If reading this in the future, this was the Saturday when Scotland unexpectedly beat the favourites, France, then Italy beat England for the first time in thirty-five years.)

Next chat on my journey back to my peg was with an angler who had a rod line out but was also feeding a swim by small-potting something from the end of a small pole or maybe an elasticated whip. He explained that he was using a method feeder on his rod but needed a float to watch, hence the pole. I wondered if his head was where mine had been a few weeks ago.

Back at my own peg, I set up the box with all the various bits that now hang off the legs, including a brand-new roost that fits on a back leg and has two, right-angled, extensions to hold around eight top-kits. By the time I’d plumbed up ten metres either side of me in the margins, and ten metres out in front, and was putting actual bait on for the first time, it was nine-thirty, so one and a half hours after arriving.

I’d always done well with the pole in margins, in fact, my pole is called the edge-monster, designed for carp in the margins, and each of those top kits had twenty to twenty-two elastic in them. Rather than fishing right against the bank, but in front of a feature, in this case reed beds, research had shown that because of the water being so clear after the winter, a depth of around three feet should be plumbed up, just away from the bank. To sum up the day’s margin fishing, just like the previous week at a different venue, no bites appeared, despite continual feeding and returning to each margin now and again.

Fishing out in front was a different matter. A swim at ten metres was plumbed up with the top-kit holding eighteen-to-twenty elastic in the hope of a carp that might be further out in the pond. Two other swims were fed with a small pot of dead maggots (red and white) sweetcorn soaked in salted caramel, with groundbait on the top of the pot to keep everything in the pot while shipping out, and these were at top-kit plus two sections and top-kit plus one section, both using the same top-kit with six-to-eight elastic.

Because I was at the far end of the pond, and most others had chosen pegs nearer the cars, I was able to see that not a lot was caught through the day, and what was caught seemed to be smaller roach or rudd. I kept my three swims in front of me going with small-pots to the two furthest swims while throwing loose-bait to the top-kit plus one swim.

The first swim to produce was at ten metres out in front, using a specific fence post as a marker, on the heavy elastic, and to say that there was no fight in the fish would be an understatement. Yes, it was a bream, and yes my elastic was too heavy for him, but because there is a keepnet ban at this venue, I decided to weigh him and he came in at a decent three-pounds.

Feeding the various swims again, I was concentrating more on the top-kit plus one swim, throwing in maggots and sweetcorn that sweetcorn having been soaked all day in salted caramel, and fishing over it to a specific pattern. Research again had shown that when you loose feed by hand, close in, most of the feed attains an area about the size of the roof of an average car, however, the odd bit of corn goes rogue and flies beyond the car roof, landing where the bigger, brighter fish hang out, waiting for a safe bit of thrown corn. This is exactly where my size sixteen hook holding a single grain of corn and my float were flicked out to. This produced a bite where the float rocketed down, I lifted my pole sections, the six to eight elastic streamed out of the pole end and it became obvious that this fish was not a bream.

Regular readers will know that when I hook into a carp, especially a young, angry fish, I start talking to either it or myself. “Wrong elastic,” I told him. Didn’t these fish not realise that the docile bream were supposed to be on the lighter elastic, and carp on the heavier elastic, instead of the other way around? This fish zig-zagged all over the place but because I only had a number three section to remove, I soon had him under control by using the puller kit to almost get in all the elastic and to feel all the head-nodding through the top-kit. It turned out that he was indeed a young, angry fish, as expected, and weighed five-and-a-half pounds. As I moved with the carp sling, a few pegs away, to release him, a father and son that were on the specimen pond came to have a look before he went back into the water with a thank you to the fish.

I fed that swim again, but decided to rest it for a while after the carp had zig-zagged it into oblivion. It was the top-kit plus two that produced next, too far out to loose feed, so fed through small pots with, yet again, my size sixteen with corn being flicked just a bit farther than the feed. This produced an obvious bream with no fight after the first two seconds, but this time he was four pounds in weight and a deep brown, or bronze in colour.

I abandoned the ten-metre line completely and also both margins and concentrated on my two, close-in swims. The top-kit plus one swim had been rested and as I struck into a bite on single corn, I thought, carp not bream. The fish fought in one direction and didn’t zig-zag as you would expect a carp to. I wondered if it was a tench, or big roach/rudd, or maybe an eel because I’d caught an eel once here before. As the fish eventually came to the surface it seemed obvious that it was a bream because of the forked tail and large dorsal – but it didn’t have the deep-bellied shape of a bream and he wasn’t slimy in the least. Dorsal and pelvic fins were in line so it wasn’t a rudd/bream cross and while weighing it in the weighing sling, at exactly two pounds, I noticed the blue scales on its back, similar to those that you get with a roach.

I post a photo here for anyone with the expertise that I do not have, to comment please. Is this merely a two-pound bream, or a bream-roach hybrid, or something else entirely?


That took me into my last hour before my planned starting to pack up at three and driving out of the venue at four. I had quite a few dead maggots left and had strict instructions from the wife that they could not be returned to their sealed container to go in our food fridge because they were beginning to smell. I also had the remnants of my third tin of corn soaking in salted caramel. I decided to have that final hour loose feeding and fishing double corn just beyond the loose feed on top-kit plus one. This produced a three pound bream and I was satisfied that not only had I caught larger fish than the previous week, without the inclination to fish for huge fish, but I’d worked out where my bait should be in relation to my loose feed, and it had brought in seventeen-and-a-half pound of fish, far in excess, I believe, that anyone else on the same pond.

On returning home, I was set with a dilemma. Private commercial ponds had served me well. We (grandson Wil and I) were members of Merthyr Tydfil with their waters covering the north of our county, and our applications to the Glamorgan Anglers Club had today been accepted with their lots of waters to the south of the county. What to do? My first thoughts are to try out the Glamorgan waters one by one, maybe throw in the odd commercial venue now and then, and include some of the Merthyr waters also. Summer is approaching, maybe, and it looks like we have a lot of choice going forward.