7 May 2016 – Catch Report from: Neil, Vinnie & Darren

Nine carp from to 37lbs and three cats from 62lbs to 100lbs. Not a bad week then for a first trip!

This week we had the pleasure of welcoming a group from my home town of Cheltenham. They are mates of one of my best fishing buddies “Perm”, and after hearing all the stories of his adventures, they couldn’t resist the temptation any longer! Stoked by Perm’s enthusiasm for the place, the pre-trip excitement had been building to epic proportions so when Neil banked two carp to 37lbs, and Vinnie had a scarper 30 the very first night, to say that they were happy would be a slight understatement! As per normal at Beausoleil, just when they thought things couldn’t get any better, they did when Vinnie banked the 3rd 100lbs catfish of the year. Get in! Vinnie fished from the big double and used plenty of Nutty Banoffee to keep the runs coming. He had a blinding session and ended up top rod with six fish in total highlighted by PB a common of 30lbs, PB mirror of 33lbs and PB catfish of 100lbs. Loving your work boy!

Perm had spent many an evening going through tactics with his buddy Neil for the channel swims so he was obviously rather keen to slide in there from the off. Neil mainly stuck to his favourite bait but when that ran out moved on to the Nutty Banoffee. Neil also had a great session with a new PB carp of 37lbs. This fish turned out to be the long lost Grey Scar. He remained un-caught for a year and a half and unfortunately is down in weight but he is an old carp now. He’s still a fantastic looking carp and it was great to see a photo of the old boy. This carp is a grand master of doing rigs so massive congratulations to Neil on managing to trip him up. Neil also got the chance to name a rather distinctive common that has just made the 30lb mark which is a nice bonus for his efforts.

Unfortunately the carp gods didn’t share their favours equally this week and Darren struggled to get among them. He did smash his PB though with a lovely upper twenty. He did assure me that he had a good holiday though and learnt loads. I’m sure this experience will definitely help him make progress with the sport. This mirror turned out to be one of the newly stocked mirrors that we’ve named the Dark Knight in honour of his colouration. The way a carp looks is as important to us as the weight and it’s important to have a good variety of shapes and sizes too, from big torpedoes to stockier built fish.

One important lesson that we all learnt this week was just how much bait our carp can get through in an angling situation at this time of year. I have a new device that I’ve been using all winter to scrap the bottom of the lake in search of uneaten bait. I can only use it in depths of less than 5ft but it will find the smallest piece of broken boilie, pellet or particle. I’ve used it to judge winter feed levels so that the carp have exactly what they need but no more, as rotting bait is bad for water quality. The guys were interested in the technique and I offered to test the spots they’d been fishing. Based on my experience this winter I kind of knew the outcome already but it was impressive to see nonetheless and the lads stood agog as I failed to find any uneaten bait. In two days they had applied 17kg of boilies and what was left? ….. nothing. Not one single bait, or a half bait. The fish had steadily munched their way through the lot. During this time, six fish were banked with just one lost. So next time you’re out fishing and you’ve dotted 20 baits around each rig, you can pretty much guarantee that within minutes of a carp arriving over the rig he’s cleaned you out, probably done the rig and then done the off leaving you with fishing a single and the next carp has the choice of whether to risk it or not…. It’s amazing we ever catch anything really!