It's That Time Of Year Again... Paul Stevens

This entry was posted on 18th April, 2016

Well, here we are again! There are only a few more days to go until Stephen Crowe and I fish the first qualifier of the UK Carp Champs 2016, held at the famous Walthomstow Reservoir Number 1 in the centre of London.

In previous years we have fished the BCAC carp matches and have reached the final, which is held at Wraysbury – a very iconic carp lake and comes full of history. This is the first year that we have entered both UK Carp Champs and BCAC competitions so our workload for all the preparations leading up to the first match has doubled. At times this has meant nights of both of us tying lots of rigs to try and cover all the different scenarios we could encounter.



Walthomstow 1 is currently closed to anglers as there has been a fair bit of improvement carried out on the banks and a new reed bed has been put in place around the Island meaning that there is no longer casts tight to the Island margins. We cannot gauge if this is a good thing or not but I guess we will find out soon enough! Getting information from the fishing community is much harder this year, as like I said above it has been closed whilst this working has been carried out. On one hand, we both think it’s a good thing and the fish will be on the munch when it opens for the match. On the other hand, it’s not so good as we are struggling to find any up to date information. The only thing to do is to go with a very open mind and try things until we can work out what the fish are wanting.



This brings me on to what we are taking with us. Both of us have been very busy with tying different types of rigs as we strongly believe that the more prepared you are and the smoother you can run the better. We have around 30 IQ D-Rigs tipped with some of Stephen’s homemade wafters, 30 plan braided rigs tipped with semi buoyant yellow corn, and around 40 Zigs with different coloured foam just in case we need to fish higher in the water. Hopefully we have nearly everything covered.

The bait approach will be also very varied; we are taking gallons of maggots, prepared particles (hemp & corn), boilies, and also many different types of groundbait. We need to cover every aspect of carp fishing and hopefully will find a winning combination that will see Stephen and I proceed to our first semi-final of 2016.