Sunday – Girlfriends weekend off, so no fishing today.

Monday – Spent the day catching up on paperwork and writing an article for Coarse Angling Today.
 
Tuesday – Last week, whilst guiding an angler on the river Loddon, l noticed a swim that seemed to be full of predators and had promised myself an early morning visit to see exactly what they were, however after having a bait on the go for over two hours it failed to get any attention, so either it was just one of those days, or whatever they were had moved on.
 
Wednesday – The whole day was spent on the banks of the River Severn helping out the winners of the Total Coarse Fishing Korum Challenge Competition. A separate blog has been designated for the event and can be read on my website www.duncancharman.co.uk 

Thursday – Today was to be a challenging one as a customer wanted to up his personal best grass carp. Knowing that my local Badshot Lea Lake holds a few specimens we decided that it was worth a go and planned to fish overnight. The first thing that was prepared was the swim and armed with a Spomb we deposited a good bed of particles made up of Sonubaits Hemp, corn, tigers and crushed tigers along with some pellets. Bait was either corn stacks or Tigers, both critically balanced. A game plan was to keep casting every hour or so, moulding some scolded pellets around the lead each time as well as spodding some bait over the top. Unfortunately the weather was against us with high pressure bring clear skies, dropping temperatures and worst of all a brisk easterly wind. The bobbins did move though, once from a 12lb 15oz common that had us fooled into thinking it was our target species plus the odd bream but l cant help thinking that a couple of strange bites that were missed came from what we were after. Anyway it wasn’t from lack of trying that a grass carp failed to show but we did leave with another tactic up our sleeve for the next visit. 

Friday – After just four hours sleep the alarm had me out of the sleeping bag at 4am and after fishing till 9am l headed home for a few hours shut eye, before meeting my dad at Johnson’s for a few hours after dark crucian fishing. Obviously the wind direction had put the fish off the feed and although the odd crucian did roll just two small carp came for our efforts. 

Saturday – The standard fishing write up and photo manipulation took most of the day.