Has Spring, Sprung...? Michael Stewart

This entry was posted on 5th March, 2014

It’s been a couple of months since I last wrote a catch report and that's simply because I haven’t caught a carp since mid December!

My last few sessions on the Cambridgeshire water hadn't been good, with only one take in January, which I managed to lose, my enthusiasm was waning big style! However there's a saying; that a change is as good as a rest, so that's exactly what I decided to do.

The start of February saw me heading back to a well known Norfolk club water, not only would this offer me a break from the Cambridgeshire water, it would also save me a bundle of cash in fuel costs, which would go a fair way to paying for ticket renewals.

I arrived just after midday and after a couple of uninspiring laps of the main lake I had a wander round the Tench lake, the smaller of the two lakes, its rumoured to only house around 25 carp and as the name suggests, plenty of nice Tench.

With a lack of anglers and angling pressure and with the added incentive of fishing from the car I decided to settle back in on one of the swims I’d fished the previous week.

My first three trips on the waters had only produced Tench, mostly in the 5-8lb bracket, but on my latest trip I had seen a nice Carp roll, so it made sense to pitch up back in this area.

I’d tweaked my rigs slightly to try and avoid the Tench; longer gently curved Chods around 3.5 inches long, crafted from 25lb Ace Riggamortis and finished with a size 5 ESP Stiff Rigger, would be the chosen rig for two of my rods. The third was fished with a rig nicknamed the ‘bent nail rig’, this consisted of a size 7 ESP Longshanx , a rig ring tied close to the eye, with a 1.5 inch shrink tube kicker, tied to 20lb ESP Two Tone Striptease. The idea behind this rig is that with about a inch of hook or shrink tube protruding each side of a 16mm pop up it makes it very difficult, for all but the most persistent Tinca to swallow!

The rigs were placed onto the same spots as they had been in the previous session and each was lightly baited with around 30-50 Dynamite Baits White Chocolate and Coconut Boilies. I used a mini Spomb to get the freebies out, one because it’s a very neat way of feeding and two because I can avoid the hoardes of flying rats!!!

Hookbaits were my own Corkball Specials with the same flavour combo in either white or washed out pink.

Friday was relatively quiet, only producing three red eyed bait snafflers, the rigs seemed to be working and were certainly slowing the Tench action down, but there was no way of avoiding them completely.

At 1.00pm on Saturday, on the rod where’d I’d seen the Carp roll previously, the line pulled up tight and pinged from the line clip, my initial thoughts were Tench and even when I connected with the fish I didn’t think otherwise; that was until the clutch slowly started to tick away!

This was certainly no Tinca!

The fish was extremely powerful, plodding away in the middle of the lake, I slowly tried to coax her closer to my bank.

Any thoughts of me trying to keep the capture quiet were soon scampered as I was greeted by three of the lakes bailiffs, there’d heard the commotion and wandered over to investigate.

There words… ‘that’s a thirty all day long’… didn’t help in what had become a tense battle, and it was a full ten minutes later before I caught the first glimpse of my prize. As the fish broke surface around ten yards out I slowly eased her into the folds of my waiting landing net, and as she rolled in I let out a massive sigh of relief, my first Carp from the ‘Tench Lake’ was mine!



I left her in the net for a while to recover, enabling me to get everything sorted for the weighing and photos.

On the scales she pulled the needle on the Reubens round to a very satisfactory 33lb 14oz, not bad for my first fish from the lake! To really put the icing on the cake it was also a fish that hadn’t been out for over three years!

Throughout Saturday night and into Sunday morning a couple more Tench brought me back to reality and with a big drop in temperature that was to be the only action. I left more than happy and with it being the start I March, my thoughts turned to spring…

Has spring, sprung? I do hope so!

Tight Lines

Michael Stewart



The Tackle Box Harrison Torrix Carp Rods ESP Stiff Rigger Hooks Ace Riggamortis ESP Leadcore The Spomb