Pleasure session at Plantation

Bit pissed off today, having no match to fish!! Avon Angling match sold out, Carps AC match sold out (and 3 reserves) and the silvers match at Viaduct cancelled.

I headed down towards Kingston Seymour and rang Tony on the off chance he had a no show - no such luck. I had a walk round Bullock Farm and a chat to Phil, there was work in progress, a new footbridge to the island was under construction and a couple of the ropey old platforms had been renewed on the match lake. The lakes at Bullock Farm are still very clear, I'm really hoping the water temperature rises a couple of degrees by the time the Kev Perry series starts.

As it was freezing in the easterly wind and I didn't fancy any of the pegs that had the wind from behind, I bade Bullock Farm farewell and headed round to Plantation. Only acouple of anglers on the lake when I got there, so could choose where I fished, several pegs were closed off, as James and his Dad were repairing them and reclaiming some bank - fishery maintenance, its obviously catching.

I settled for peg 38, the point, I've never drawn this peg, so it was as good as any to practice. I had made up my mind to have a session on the feeder / straight lead, to brush up on my technique when casting tight to islands. I set up a mini cage feeder, with maggot and crushed up feed pellet as the filling, maggot on the hook. Third cast the tip went round and an odd shaped carp (huge head, very wide) that weighed about 2½lb was in the net after a very valiant struggle. Next cast a 10oz skimmer, then a couple of casts later, a roach - obviously not rammed full of hungry carp over there then..... I struggled for bites after that, switching to straight lead and trying away from where I'd chucked the feeder.

As this was supposed to be a pleasure session, I decided to abandon the lead rod and set up a pole to fish caster at 10m, I also fed a line that let me fish top three to hand, although I wasn't too hopeful for that line. The 10m line produced a couple of small roach, but was pretty slow, the 3m line started to produce fish , the roach were coming up in the water, I set up another rig to fish half depth and caught roach, rudd and perch to around the 14oz mark, I dropped the full depth rig in occasionally and picked up two carp on this, gave me a run round on middy hi viz purple elastic.

30 seconds before 4.30 (my all out), I hooked a large carp, this was on No6 solid latex and when the hook pulled 20 minutes later, I hadn't managed top get its head up off the bottom.

If I had done the sensible thing and fished for silvers all day, I would probably have had 20lb of silvers (I reckon I had just over 10lb) and maybe a couple more carp, caster was certainly the bait of the day.

I've now sussed how to use my phones camera, so for novelty value.....


The best roach always hide when a camera comes out.....

And the carp, the photo doesn't do justice to the huge head on the one in the middle.




And finally, James revealed that Darren 'Noddy' Vowles fished the peg the day before and "struggled a bit to catch, he also dropped his phone in, I went in for him but couldn't find it"

I can't even ring or text him to take the piss............