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 changed to spikes. Preston Innovations, 0.24 mm line, size 10 hooks, KKH barbless, with screw in bayonets.
Because the pop ups and boilies were bigger, I’d also sent for three Ronnie Rigs, with screws that would penetrate the boilie or pop up and I hadn’t yet decided whether to attach them directly to the feeder or to have a four-inch hook length. In my head, once the few dry bags were spent, I would run my main line through a method feeder, leave three inches of line showing, attach the Ronnie rig, pinch some lead onto the line next to the feeder to stop the three inches going back into the feeder, load up with sticky pellets and force the hook into the top of the pile, with a pop-up or boilie on display. Casting then to where the dry bags had been also seemed like a good idea.
With all the loose feed of pellets we had used last week, and we envisaged to be used the next time Wil and I went out, new bags of 8mm tiger nut pellets and 8mm Cell pellets arrived, as did yet another two bags of sticky pellets. I decided then that although I’d stated in an earlier chapter that we didn’t use a stopwatch because we weren’t match anglers, I would get a cheap, plastic, (£8) stopwatch that had a ‘go’ and a ‘reset’ button so that we could both change baits at regular intervals, depending on bites. A YouTube channel suggested this, in case a carp came in, slurped the pellets, and then left the boilie/wafter/popup sitting on its own without the angler knowing.
That might have seemed like enough purchases for the week except that my neighbour asked if I could do him a favour. He had a pond with six small fish in it, half of them koi the other half goldfish. He gave me a tub of 3mm pellets and asked if I could lean over our fence and drop eight pellets in each morning, which I did. The pellets floated, the fish were too small to eat the pellets, so they nibbled and pushed the pellets around. A thought struck me and although summer was coming to a close, I decided that my margin pole, with unweighted float, a long trace and a banded 8mm koi pellet on the surface might be good fun. A bag of Herons 8mm koi, ‘growth and colour,’ floating pellets was ordered and arrived the next day. Maybe, I thought, if we went to Hazel Court, I’d fish them on a pole after seeing if a loose feed drew fish to top-feed. If Wil insisted on Mallard at Tri-Nant, the Vortex whip would be employed.
Another experiment came into my head before fishing day. If we fished another all nighter, and left the rods out as we slept, what would stop the rods slipping into the water, because we only have two bait runner reels? I purchased elasticated bungees, hooks either end, one hook for the reel and one for the strong tent pegs that we’d purchased for the tent and umbrella.
On the morning of fishing, while loading the car, I took out the bucket that contained the dry groundbait mixture that was made up of two different groundbaits, hemp and micro-pellets. It was great for cupping with my pole but too dry for making groundbait balls. I added liberal amounts of fish oil and scopex oil until the right consistency was achieved.
When we reached Mallard, there was one car in the car park, we could see the angler, float fishing on the right-hand side, decided on the left for us but ended up skirting around the bottom of the lake and ending up on the right but down the deep end and among the trees. I mention the trees and have mentioned before about this being a wild and natural lake with lots of snags, because today we would lose two method feeders and probably four or five hook lengths.
With everything set to go, Wil, on my left, cast his right-hand rod with his usual wafter and sticky pellets, out to around twenty feet, and I did the same with my left-hand rod, to roughly the same spot, but with a dry bag of boilies, not boilie crush but whole boilies. I then started to feed the spot with three large balls of the ‘new groundbait’ as we were calling it. Our other two rods, the ones on the outside, were cast to the middle of the lake, both with method feeders, pink wafters, and sticky pellets.
Wil’s outside rod was first to connect, and he eventually landed a four-pound common carp that fought well above his weight. Having rebaited and recast he followed it up with what he quickly announced, on lifting the rod, was a bream, that although looking bigger than its weight, weighed three-and-a quarter pound. He was two nil up but nobody was surprised, and for a few hours all went quiet, or in common parlance, fish-go-bye-bye.
I was using the stopwatch to rebait and decided to bring both my rods into the area that had been pre-baited. One rod had a method feeder down to a Ronnie rig with a screw into a pink pop-up, and instead of using our sticky pellets, I used the new groundbait and hand-pressed it onto the feeder. This was only possible because of the underarm cast to the baited area. This produced a five-and-a-half-pound common, and then everything went quiet again.
With my right-hand rod in the same baited up area, but with a method feeder, pink wafter and sticky pellets, a-la-Wil, I set up my modified whip and sat to the left of all the rods, float fished with an 8mm banded pellet in the margin, and fed with 8mm pellets. I got a bite on the whip, struck, and all hell let loose. The 18-20 elastic shot out, the fish tried to get to a tree, my whip bent double and looked as if it could snap, but the hook length snapped. I wondered if the whip experiment was over, saw the elastic hanging out of the end of the top section by about six inches, realised that the elastic at the other end had gone up inside the second section and decided to retire the thing. One good thing though, to come out of all this, was that the whip now folds down completely.
As I was sorting things out, Wil shouted “Green” after an alarm had sounded. Green means that it was my rod alarm that was showing on the control panel that he keeps on his chair, red and blue being his rods. Before I could react, I witnessed the rod move, the rod pod that was unbalanced with only one rod on it tip over, and my rod slipping into the water. I hurdled two rods and jumped down four feet onto the concrete platform and just managed to grab the rod handle before it slipped into the water. I’d decided that the bungees wouldn’t be needed today, and I was wrong.
Immediately I knew it was a carp and immediately I knew it wasn’t a four pounder that was full of spirit. This felt big, for us, and I was hoping for a ten-pound common. Wil grabbed the landing net and weaved it through the other rods. “Jeez Bampa,” he told me, “I thought you had to move slowly and be careful about brittle bones. I’m beginning to think you put it all on.”
When he saw the fish near the surface, he announced that it was big and that it was clearly a mirror carp. The danger, I decided, didn’t come from vigorous head shaking, like it does with smaller carp, but with the sheer weight of the tumbling fish on the end of my line. Our only other angler on the lake came down to watch, and after Wil had expertly netted the prize, our friendly angler held rods and line up for us to get under them and to the carp bath and weighing sling. Okay, not ten pounds but at eight-and-a half-pounds he was a good three-and-a-half over my PB for a mirror.
We carried him to the next peg to say thank you to him as we let him go, and I sat for five minutes to try and get my pulse down to somewhere close to normal-ish.
No more action that day but Wil messaged his friend about possibly fishing with us, and it so happens that for a month in Wales there’s a scheme on where you can invite a friend to fish for a day throughout a month’s period, and we decided on next week maybe Hazel Court Pleasure Lake, those two under the brolly and me with my pole sat on my black box. Next week contained the 20th and that was our anniversary of the first day of fishing for us.