Now that the pup can go fishing it was time to get my teeth into, and settle on a water for the year. Despite being able to fish lots of places I had an uneasy feeling as to where to head for until I was fortunate enough to witness some fish in a large, lightly stocked 70 acre water that I used to fish some 10 years ago.

It is not an easy lake to come to terms with as the fish have a huge expanse of water to utilise where angler’s baits are just never seen, and they often put on a display of biblical proportions just to rub salt in!!

There are other obstacles present, a sailing club shares the water, but they do tend to respect the anglers which makes a refreshing change, there are also Cray fish present, so dealing with them will be interesting and on top of that, access is a little tricky as the path is heavily rutted, making using a wheelbarrow difficult to say the least. This adds to the mental challenge of what would be difficult water anyway, but as an upside, it puts lots of anglers off and so you can fish in relative peace and go about your business.

This is good news as I have been baiting an area off one bank that doesn’t appear to have been fished. There is a large plateau that has 9’ on top of it with varying depths to 13’, that is surrounded by a drop off that goes down to 21’. A very interesting area indeed. The bream love it, so a mix of pellets and also large hard 20mm plum and shellfish baits have both been deposited on several occasions over the last week or so, the plan being to get the fish feeding and clearing the light weed so I can then fish finer in order to not only hook and land any carp, but also the Bream and Tench which run to huge sizes too.

By being willing, and quite happily, to catch all species, I find it not only an enjoyable way to fish but also far easier to determine how much bait to use and keep introducing. If I was only willing to use say double 20mm baits to avoid the ‘nuisance fish’ then I wouldn’t get an idea of how much bait was being eaten.

It is very hard to work out how much to introduce but I’ve begun with a mix consisting of; 2kg 4mm halibut pellets, 1kg 4mm s-feed pellets, 2kg of hemp and maize, 2 kg of hemp and hali crush and around 3 kg of the new boilies in either 15 or 20mm. It seems quite a lot, but considering I am feeding not only any carp, but vast amounts of big bream and also the Crays it will soon be eaten. This amount gets put into the swim twice a week.

I’m hoping the Crays will almost get preoccupied on the fishy pellets and will then ignore the larger hard boiles for a while. Wishful thinking? I’ll let you know the outcome on regular intervals, but be prepared for some nice scenic shots as I think I have my work cut out for me!!

Til next time, tight lines.