Angling Direct (Cardiff) have been good to over the year and when I rang to ask them if they had a Ten Metre Margin Monster in stock the lady said yes, and that if I called down after eleven, the pole expert would be there to show me how to put it together and to ensure it wasn’t too heavy for me.
Yes, the boss had agreed on the early birthday present.
The pole expert turned out to be similar to my age, Ted, and he walked me through the Edge Monster, elasticated both the top kits for me with 14 to16 elastic, and found a tube for the extra top kit, costing an extra tenner, to keep the spare top two safe. Thanks Ted.
Day one of the fishing year at Hazel Court that will be our home through the summer months couldn’t come quick enough and was set for the 1st April. Wil would now inherit the two bait runner reels on the two method feeder rods with sensitive tips, on his alarmed tripod and I would fish with the new pole only. I figured that getting used to ten metres of pole, with two different top kits, one set at a depth for ten metres in front of me, the other set at a depth down the margin, both having cups to feed loose pellets, would be enough for me without having a method feeder out as well.
A pole sock had arrived in the post as did a roller for the pole to be shipped back onto, secondly and more importantly, when we got to Hazel Court, every peg was taken on the three major ponds. Wil enquired about Jim’s pond, it was completely empty, so we decided that rather than go home we would silver fish for a day.
For Wil this was all a bit pointless because he had a method feeder rod, wanted to keep it as that, and knew that his chances of catching a carp were almost impossible. He settled his rod on the alarmed pod, made himself comfortable and spent the day on his stop-motion videos. He stayed fishless but did enjoy watching now and again, the canada goose female on a nest on the island in the middle of Jim’s pond, her male patrolling the waters looking for any intruders and then a red kite flying overhead looking for carrion. He also enjoyed the peace and quiet as we had the pond to ourselves all day, much as we had in the early days, seven months ago.
I set up my feeder chair around ten feet away and had on my right my feeder arm to take the two top-two kits, and the rod rest attachment that now housed the pole sock. I picked a target in front of me, a particularly distinct lily pad leaf to aim for, and also a reed that was bent over down the edge and plumbed up both so that I could use both top kits with both being around two inches over depth and with four millimetre pellets on bands. I now needed to feed both swims prior to fishing.
I’d watched countless YouTube videos on shipping out, how hard pellets in a pot should be dipped so that they didn’t all fly out, but no matter how easy these people made it look the reality for me was quite different and I had pellets flying all over the pond. It was all a learning curve and thankfully on a pond, alone, with nobody watching. I found that my lovely knew roller was too far behind me so that when the thick end of the pole came off the roller it hit the ground with a thump and pellets scattered everywhere. Then with the roller position rectified the next disaster was because I loaded the pot, got hold of the thick end of the top kit, twisted it to line it up with the number three section, and the pellets fell out.
Eventually I got to a position where I could ship pellets out, drop them over my float, and place my butt section over both my knees with my forearm on top of the pole, looking as if I knew what I was doing. Roach and rudd came quickly and plentifully from both swims and although this pole was an edge monster, designed for carp fishing, I took it to be a practice day that I’d found was very much needed.
Fish were coming in all day and the only practice I wasn’t getting was using the elastic puller at my end, because no fish was pulling the elastic at their end. Then it happened and the bite indicated by my float dipping then had the elastic coming out of my top two kit for the first time. I shipped in thinking a small carp, the size of the one that Wil had caught on this pond, and with the top two in my hand I was able to practice on the elastic puller although there wasn’t really that much need to. As the fish hit the surface it was an obvious rudd, I netted it myself and announced to Wil that it deserved to be weighed. It was exactly two pounds so easily a PB for me.
With an hour to go, I decided on some sport with top two plus one section, just in front of me. Again, lots of small roach and rudd with an elastic pulling bream of around a pound and a half, but all in all a fun day. I asked Wil if he’d been bored and he told me no. He’d done masses on his current stop-motion, had wrestled with Griff the farm dog on three different occasions and had wandered the ponds with his phone taking pictures for backgrounds for stop motions.
Learning for next week? All pegs were taken on the major ponds because it was the first day of opening for the fishery. That is our assumption and it could be that all pegs get occupied throughout the summer because we haven’t witnessed a summer yet having started coarse fishing in October last. Next week we plan to arrive early, around eight AM to see how the land lies. That would give us eleven hours of fishing if we wanted it, from eight until seven.
We got to Hazel Court earlier than normally on 8th April, but not at eight o’ clock as planned. Around nine we pulled up at the gates and Debbie the fisheries manager informed us that all ponds had vacant pegs. As we drove in, Wil immediately chose the Pleasure Pond and went for the peg in the far corner nearest to the gate to Jim’s Pond, the peg where he’d caught his nine carp on the fifth of January including a beautiful koi. This was nothing like a January day and we’d had a number of days of bright sunshine in the past week, and rising temperatures, so all looked well.
Having shared the lugging of all our equipment over to our spot, I set the umbrella up to shield Wil from the sun while he set his chair up and then he tackled his single method feeder rod. He has had so much success with a pink wafter amongst sticky pellets on the method feeder, with pink haze covering it all before casting out, that he finds it impossible to change – and why should he?
I sat to the left of Wil in my feeder chair with the feeder arm now being used to take my two top-two kits and the butt rest holder was now sporting one rod holder and the sock for my number three pole end to sit in. The roller was set up behind me, two paces back and one to my right, and only needed minor adjustment after its first positioning. I plumbed up using both top kits but using different configurations. The first, with most of the weight at the bottom, was against a margin that was at ninety degrees to our bank, in other words, I sat at the ninety-degree angle of the pond banks and my pole provided the hypotenuse of a triangle. A different coloured reed from the rest was my marker.
Plumbing up straight ten metres in front of me, with a concrete peg in the distance as a marker, gave a greater depth with shot strung out to give an even drop as the bait sank. Baits were hard pellets throughout the day with experiments going on between four, six, and eight millimetre pellets. Pots on the ends of both top kits were filled at first with micro pellets that had been soaked in pond water at the venue, and then, when dried out, they’d been soaked again in general fish oil. Later, loose pellets were cupped out.
When I was happy with my combinations, had both swims fed, and was ready to fish seriously, I had to ship in rapidly and grab the larger of our two landing nets to help Wil.
Wil, it seemed, always caught first and this fighter turned out eventually to be a mirror carp with an orangey, goldfish-like tail. He looked worth weighing and turned out to be seven pounds two ounces which was two pounds under Wil’s overall carp PB but was a new PB for a mirror, so happy days. At this point we were joined on the bank, by a young lad fishing a zig rig so we had three styles of fishing going on over our two pegs.
It wasn’t long before I was shipping in again to grab the net for Wil. “Either an old carp who can’t be bothered, or a bream,” Wil told me and the bream turned out to be a decent size of five pound seven ounces. While we were weighing the fish, the young lad on the next peg came over to ask Wil what method he was using as he hadn’t had a bite, as I too hadn’t. When he was told it was a method feeder, he told us he’d heard about them but never seen one so Wil took him through all the stages of re-baiting to show him what to do in the future.
It was my turn to strike at a bite then but what was obviously a carp, snagged me in some reeds and threw the hook, but the momentary elastic-stretch had my heart pumping and wanting more. As Wil and I contemplated the fact that two couples opposite us and two anglers to our right seemed to be all catching small silvers, and were maybe using maggots as a bait, I had to ship in again to net Wil’s third of the day, another mirror but this time one of six pounds and five ounces. Because we’d just been discussing the fact that we knew what others were catching, we both wondered, separately, if they were all watching us as Wil took his rod and I took the net to the other side of the brolly, where the carp bath and weighing sling was.
I was not having much luck, except for my lost fish, and had experimented with all sorts and sizes of hard pellets. As yet a further experiment, I decided to abandon the butt section of my pole and fish two sections plus the top two. This provided a blank out in front of me but was successful in the margin. Rather than reaching out to the bank that was ninety degrees to the bank of our peg using the whole ten metres of pole, this combination reached into the pond's corner, where presumably nobody fished because there was a weeping willow tree there and its branches wept down into the water. (I know it was a willow, or pussy willow to us, because my pole was covered in yellow pollen on shipping in.) As a completely new swim I had an eight-millimetre hard pellet on the band of my hook length so placed five of the same pellets into the cup, shipped out, dropped the pellets from the cup at height to make a splash, and then raised my hooked pellet out of the water and dropped it slowly as if it was immitating one of my free offerings.
Within seconds, the float shot under rapidly and I struck into what felt like a good fish. Luckily for me he shot out towards the middle of the pond, away from the snags and had stretched my elastic to longer than my pole length, which was still two sections plus top two. I had to concentrate on the fish, where he was going, playing him against his direction of travel, worrying where my butt section was and how to get my other two sections in to the sock knowing that they wouldn’t reach the roller. Everything except my top two kit eventually landed up on the floor as Wil promised not to tread on it while he waited with the landing net. “It’s a chunk,” he told me as it went this way and that. Wil spurred me on not realising that pulling elastic, or letting it go again, takes longer than reeling a fish in with rod and reel.
Eventually the common carp went into the large landing net and Wil repeated the chunk name as we both had to carry the landing net to the carp bath. We both stared at the fish for a while, partly because he was a magnificent looking fish and partly because my hook was now out of its mouth and hooked into the landing net but he still had a hook in his mouth. With Wil holding him down to calm him, I used forceps to take the foreign hook out. The hook was attached to a braid hook length with a long braid loop to a plastic stop (braid is not allowed at this fishery) and the other end was attached to a green plastic sleeve that had at one time been attached to a weight but thankfully, the weight was no longer there so our fish hadn't been dragging it about.
We weighed the fish and struggled to hold the scales up. Ten pounds four ounces. In big carp terms this is not the specimen that carp anglers who are after thirty or forty pounders are after, but for us, who have been trying for eight months to break ten pound, he was a wish come true. I had the attached photo, naturally, placed him gently back into the water using the sling, in a better state than he’d come out, and then did the PB dance, which is a bit like a dad-dance or a granddad-dance.
Eventually it was time to pack up and Wil had caught three good fish, me only one, but we’d both had PBs so it had been a great spring day and maybe heralded things to come in the summer. In the car I was made to promise that I wouldn’t go on and on about having, for the first time ever, a heavier fish PB than Wil, and we went for a drive-through meal to end the day.
Learnings for next week? For Wil, I think, it will be to get two rods out and to try hard for a bigger carp, possibly with a larger wafter. For me, I cannot get over the thrill of seeing elastic stretch the way it did and I know that an eight-millimetre pellet is definitely not too large a bait. In fact, as far as I am now concerned, it’s a bigger bait for a bigger fish but less fish. I’d had concerns about back shots above the float but had tried them today and when I had a sneezing fit (mild hay fever) they worked to keep my float steady. In fact, I will take Andy May’s advice and Tippex the backshot white, so that they are more visible.