Fishing report: Mid/End July

A great couple of weeks of summer fishing ☀️

Mid July, we welcomed Simon and Hailey to the venue for their first visit to us. This was going to be more of a holiday with fishing with days out during the week but Simon did two nights and multiple short day sessions. He booked me for the tuition and we spent a very productive day going through in detail my approach which he really enjoyed. Most anglers I meet have learned this sport themselves in isolation so that day helped to bring some focus and belief to his fishing.

Simon applied my low bait strategy with plenty of sharp hooks on a simple running inline lead and caught steadily all week. All rigs were positioned using a bait boat. He came hoping for just one fish. By the end of the week, he’d caught a netful and they were able to have the perfect balance between the holiday that Hailey wanted and the holiday that he wanted.

Hailey absolutely loved the place, loved the peace, the tranquillity but most of all she loved seeing her man grinning from ear to ear holding up plenty of carp and a big catfish for the camera. 

For the last week of July, we welcomed back Steve and his son Charlie along with family friend Carl. This would be their 4th visit to us and they were super excited to be back. Carl doesn’t fish but he loves spending time here. He is also a full timer runner/helper and this week he was going to have his work cut out keeping the team operating at max capacity. With 4 trips under their belt and a full day’s tuition with me the first time around, the guys are getting on great with their fishing everywhere they go and are having good success on trickier waters.

They did a couple of hours on Saturday evening and caught 1 carp and 4 catfish. After a very long drive, they didn’t exactly leap out of bed on Sunday but got fishing by around 11am. By 9pm they’d had 7 more carp and 6 more catfish… oh and Sammy of course. Now that is busy!

The same pattern continued all week, right up until the last minutes of the session. They got going most morning between 10 -11am and by 10pm they were done. Each day they also wound in the early afternoon for a break and refuel, then got going again for more action. 

The guys used 16mm bottom baits with half a popup to create a little snowman rig. This was tied KD style to a short shark beaked pointed hook and fished on an inline running lead. Steve is meticulous in his rig prep and tied a new rig with a brand new hand sharpened hook for every cast. No re-sharpening of hooks. No re-use of rigs. Catch or blank, it was in the bin and a fresh one tied on. Their hooklink of choice was the 35lb Armourlink. In total Steve tied 90 rigs and used 9 x packets of hooks.

At the start of the week, they used a 4 bait stringer but the small catfish homed straight in on that so they opted for single bait, no PVA and sprayed 11 baits over a wide area with a catapult. Spots were only re-baited after a capture. No prebaiting was necessary. In total they used 7kg of bait for the whole week between them.

Rather than rush to get the rods in, the first hours of the day were spent walking the lake and identifying the “hot zones”. Once they’d worked out the pattern, then it was a case of prep the rigs, cast out, apply a handful of bait, catch, repeat. When you say it like that it sounds too simple to be true but that’s what they did but it takes a lot of skill, experience and confidence to get to that level.

What was interesting was that unlike other ‘special’ weeks we’ve had this year, they did it all “old school”. Most rigs were cast. No bait boat, no echo sounder, no rowing boat. Their only concession to modern angling was a Nash bushwhacker baiting pole but that only came into play when needed. 

This week, Steve and Charlie demonstrated what’s possible when you join up the dots and the stars align. To say it was a special week of angling would be an understatement 🏆 It was great to meet them again and we look forward to seeing them again in the future.

To view all the fish caught in the last couple of weeks, click here