During the week, a steady stream of items arrived at our house. Pre-tied-Ronnie-rigs that were made up with thirty-pound line and size eight hooks, a fold down bucket for supplying water to a carp in the carp cradle or weighing sling, a new shelter that was more of a tent type than the umbrella type that we’d been using, and that we had to sometimes hang on to, and a pot of twelve-millimetre, buchu-berry, pink pop-ups. Because the Ronnie rigs ended with a swivel, I had to find, on YouTube, how to attach the swivel to the pop-up and then had to order some bait floss. Yet more learning then.
Later came a spool of fifteen-pound line that I placed on my bait-runner reel, after stripping the eight-pound line off, and finally a PVA mesh kit arrived. I considered all this to be ‘beefing things up’ and, if successful, hoped that Wil would follow my lead. Maybe, my logic told me, if I started catching bigger and more consistently, Wil might be weaned off his method feeders and we could purchase all of the above to cover his rods as well.
Obviously, there were still a couple of questions to be asked. If all this beefing-up did produce larger carp, then would the method feeder rods be up to the task? We would soon find out, hopefully. The other question was about silt bottoms. The ponds at Hazel Court were silt bottomed, fed by streams with water emptying from one pond to the next. We had discovered that White Springs, or at least The Big Pit, had a silt bottom close in, stirred up by last week’s carp’s tail, so would the change to a Ronnie-rig and a mesh bag help that situation. I imagined the mesh bag landing on the bottom with a softer drop than a method feeder, maybe standing more chance of staying on top of the silt than being buried into it, even if the lead stuck in.
On a couple of occasions through our first year of fishing, I’d tried dry PVA bags, not always successfully, and not always wanting all the hassle of making the bags up. These mesh bags that I’d purchased seemed like a good compromise. The Ronnie-rig could stay on throughout the day, and I could sit in the shelter and make up mesh bags, because the kit came with the mesh in a tube, a plunger to push the freebies down into the mesh, and after tying the bag off, there was even a pair of scissors to cut through between two knots to be ready to start again. The first bags, I guessed, would be made up from what we’d called our special groundbait – micro pellets, green and brown groundbait, various glugs and flavourings that were PVA friendly, and the odd bits of sweetcorn that were left over at the end of a session.
Wil had identified one particular peg on Dragonfly at Tri-Nant that was close to the island but on the far side of the lake to where the cars were parked, so the furthest possible to take all the gear. I agreed with Wil that the swim looked good and that any carp circling the island would have to travel down the thin neck of water between the peg in question and the island. “No,” Wil explained. “The peg has four-gee and I can carry on with my stop-motion work on my phone, between bites.” Maybe, we thought, we could try there.
The barometer was studied throughout the days leading up to ‘fishing day’ and as the remnants of Hurricane Erin kept affecting the weather, and rain showers were more frequent, the barometer dipped to below a thousand, for the first time in what felt like weeks. We were grateful for the pressure drop; the farmers were grateful for the rain.
We asked the question in week one of this new fishing year, “is this late summer, or early autumn?” This was answered this week, the answer being that last week was late summer, this week was early autumn, and being outdoors and studying the weather, let us both know that fact, while many around us were oblivious to the fact.
Preparations were made on Monday for the following day. My three, pole top-kits were lubricated with a commercially sold lubricant for pole elastic, even though I didn’t know if my pole would be used or even taken with us. The commercially sold spray was put away for fishing day, in the box that contained the larger bottle of Jamie Hughes formulae – seven-parts water to one-part non-perfumed hair conditioner, that I’d found out about after my purchase of the commercially made item.
Ten of my twelve-millimetre, pink, buchu-berry pop-ups were drilled through, along with ten of the twelve-millimetre various coloured pop-ups that I’d sliced in half last year. Some sort of semi-snowman would be made up from one of each. It struck me then that by using bait floss, the hair could be any length I wanted it to be, within reason. (I’ve seen on YouTube a hair containing three boilies.) One and only one, mesh bag was made up, ready to be cast out, and for some reason, I greatly relished the idea of making more up in the shelter. Maybe this was to give me something to do between bite alarms, maybe it was in a hope that it would make me look as if I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t sure. What I was sure about was that the mesh was twenty-five millimetre in diameter, okay but producing sausage shaped bags where the hook would have to go in the middle. I would have to get some larger diameter bags for the beginning of a session, to feed the swim so thirty-eight-millimetre mesh bags were sent for.
On leaving Wil’s house at seven in the morning on fishing day, he suggested White Springs again, and reasoned that if you are not going to get a bite all day and get bored, it was somehow a nicer place to do that in. So, off we set after a drive through breakfast. We still have to, at this point, use the Sat-nav to get there, mainly due to the complicated one-way system through Pontarddulais.
Arriving, the ritual was the same as last week, dip the nets, dip the stink bag, and go to the shop to pay. We still haven’t got the hang though, of getting from the shop to Big Pit. We circled maybe a pleasure lake where there was a match going on and we had to avoid sixteen-metre poles suddenly coming at the car, being shipped back across the road. Then we reached a dead-end, turned around, and ran the gauntlet again, probably annoying all the anglers. Two lakes later and we stopped to ask a fishery worker for directions and were directed via cabins that were visible. Eventually, we arrived at Big Pit, found a place that didn’t look familiar, and pulled up against peg forty-nine which backed onto The Old Canal.
The absolute beauty of this venue is the fact that you can park your car right next to your peg, take what you need from the boot of the car, leave the rest knowing it’s a five stride walk to get things if needed, and then leave rod cases etc. in the boot until needed when packing up. We were still a little disorientated on these lakes, but we believed we were at the deep end this week.
Our new shelter went up first, then the chairs, then rod-pods and rods, and anything not immediately needed went back into the car. After a few casts, we realised that method feeders, dry-bags, and mesh bags weren’t taking that long to reach the bottom. Wil’s method feeders were coming back with grey mud on the bottom, but only the bottom, as if that were sat on top of soft mud rather than sinking into silt.
I left things for a minute without talking, when Wil left one of his rods out, sat in the shelter, and seemed to be thinking, but then spoke. “See that clump of tall grass over the other side of the lake, behind the island, what did you say it was called, was it pampas grass, well that was the peg we were on last week so we are still at the shallow end but on the other side of the lake.”
Thoughts of moving, as we had done last week, went through both our minds, but we decided to stay and stick it out. Rather than staying without a bite, I caught a skimmer of around half a pound and Wil caught, from a bite that hardly registered, another skimmer of about a quarter of a pound. Apart from those small fish though, the morning was pretty boring. My two rods were set up, one as a mesh bag rig, the other as a method feeder, then the method feeder changed to dry-bag, then both rods went to method feeders, nothing seemed to work.
The guy behind us on the Old Canal, had a sixteen-metre pole and was fishing close to an island and was pulling fish out all of the time we were there, some of the carp being decent five or six pounders. We had a quick discussion about fishing that lake in the future and Wil properly decided that we weren’t into five-or-six-pound carp anymore and needed bigger, so should stay on Big Pit.
The weather forecast had been wrong. Monday had seen it rain all day, but today, apart from one light shower, the day was sunny and with hardly a breeze, leaving the lake like a mirror for much of the time. Wil had left both his rods on method feeders throughout the day and the only change he’d made was to not coat the sticky pellets with pink haze. He decided to seek out slightly deeper water so walked to his left, down the lake for two pegs towards the deep end, cast his feeder between two islands to his left again, and let out line as he walked back to his rod-pod where he set his alarm.
The colour coded rod alarms, Wil with red and blue, me with green and yellow, are connected by probably Bluetooth to a control unit with the four colours on it. This unit, we found, sat neatly in the elastic that held the shelter’s door open at the top, so was at eye level as you sat in the shelter. At around four in the afternoon, it happened.
“Red, red, red,” I announced. Wil struck, and as he walked down with his rod towards where he’d cast out, I heard him saying “red, red, red,” mocking me. I asked “anything?” And followed him with the small landing net. “Oh, yes, he replied and then played a fish for quite a while, the rod standing up well and bending in a lovely curve. Don’t forget that this is Wil’s lucky red rod and is a ten-foot bass spinning rod.
As soon as the fish broke the surface for the first time, I announced “shit” dropped the small landing net, ran back to Wil’s rod pod, rapidly reeled in his second rod, and ran back to Wil with the big landing net.
Wil was still playing the fish which was diving towards the bottom, coming up, and diving again. Eventually, after much tiring of the fish and Wil, the fish came to the top on its side, was easily netted, and it took the two of us to lift the landing net out of the water.
“That has to be bigger than my twelve-pound fish,” Wil announced. We both took half a net each, Wil still with his rod in his hand, and we got back to the carp cradle where the flapping fish was rested. The hook was in a hardened area of strong lip and took a while to get out, even with forceps, but when he was free of the hook, Wil poured water over him from our new bucket, followed by antiseptic spray to the hooking point and to an old wound on his side. Looking at this magnificent common carp, we knew it was over, by a few pounds, the weight of Wil’s PB of twelve. We took one side of the weighing sling each, zipped the ends up to protect him, and managed to get him to the metal tripod, already set up, with the zeroed scales on. (zeroed after soaking the sling when we first arrived.)
When he stopped flapping, he weighed thirteen pounds twelve ounces, increasing Wil’s best by one pound twelve ounces and an easy three and a quarter pounds better than my PB. We got him back to the cradle, washed him over again, and Wil took the sling to the next peg to slip him in, to say thank you to him, and to watch him swim away.
The adrenaline that was produced in Wil during the playing of the fish was still there, and he left his two rods on the bank as he walked the adrenaline off by circling the shelter. Occasionally, his head would come into the shelter and say “thirteen and three-quarters,” and then leave again. He knows that boasting to each other in this manner is not hurtful because we have both discussed in the past that when one of us catches well, the other is more pleased than the catcher.
As usual, after a fish that is a PB, fishing-on becomes an anti-climax. It wasn’t long therefore, around half an hour, before we were packing up. Packing up was so much easier with the car next to the peg.
On the drive out, we went via the other end of the lake and could see a peninsula going out into the water and small cabins either side of the lake. We memorised the area for next time as this was clearly ‘the deep end’ and a place we were yet to fish. I wonder whether we’ll go to one of our old venues next week, or whether Wil will want a return to The Big Pit?