Fishing report from: Dave & Family

A fantastic week’s fishing with loads of 30s and 40s!

This week we welcomed back Dave & wife Rose along with their son Phillip and family friend Gavan. For Dave this would be his 4th trip. Rose and Phillip have been three times and Gavan twice. With the recent drop in temperatures, the carp were playing hide and seek and there weren’t many signs to go on at first glance but with the oxygen levels high and the weather set to warm up I thought that they should be in for a decent week. 

After check in they wasted no time at all setting some traps and when Dave messaged me on Sunday morning it was clearly going to be a good week’s fishing! Everyone was off the mark with at least one carp. Phil had his nose in front with two including a big old 40. Four carp before breakfast on the first morning… yeah these guys know how to catch them!

This form continued throughout the week. Every morning the guys would update me with the latest captures and it was all we could do to keep up with identifying the carp and then logging the capture. Crazy fishing.

The weather was very stable all week as were the oxygen levels and this does make a massive difference. We even hit 9 mg/l on two days which is unheard of at this time of year. That combined with water temperature of around 18 °C meant that the carp were feeding with gusto.

They even had some days off to have a rest! That’s not to say that it was easy fishing. As we’ve seen again this year, it’s totally possible to get it wrong in these conditions. The guys have the skills and experience, read the conditions right and came up with a plan that worked faultlessly. Brilliant guys!

Some of the highlights include: Dave had the fish of a lifetime when he banked Perla at 42lbs. Gavan has a PB common of 35lbs and a PB catfish of 17lbs. Phillip didn’t break any PB’s this trip but he did catch the most (oops, shouldn’t have mentioned that 😂)

Phillips’s objectives for this year were a big common and a big catfish and if there was something missing from this week it was that neither of those objectives were achieved. After trying diligently in open water for a big cat he switched the setup to carp and re-positioned it along the island margin. Yes you’ve guessed it, what did he hook? A massive catfish! Unfortunately our catfish don’t understand the difference between a carp rig and a catfish rig and as this rig was positioned close to a very large rock that Phillip didn’t know about… the experience didn’t last long. That’s the 2nd massive catfish he’s hooked and lost so Phil wants my help when they return in April to turn the tables back in their favour.

Bait and rigs

Phillip does most of the rig prep for the group and is also the dedicated rig dropper. In previous years he’s done all this the old fashioned way from the rowing boat. But this year he’s got a bait boat to speed the process up. Love them or hate them, they are very useful here. The go-to tactic was: wait for a fish to show and drive a prepped rod over to it. Rather than drive and drop rigs blind, they waited for each show before positioning a rod on the show. It was devastatingly effective and it was only a matter of 1 hr before each rod ripped off.

Phillip loves a running rig and uses a combination of swivel based and inline based systems. His go to rig was a boom with a loop of 35lb Armourlink to create a simple multi rig. Size 5 Nash Twister hooks were changed on a constant basis and they kept the runs coming. To my knowledge they had zero hook pulls. Dave lost one carp to a marginal snag but other than that, they all went in the back of the net. Baits include Scopex Squid, tigers and pineapple pop ups. Freebies included Scopex Squid boilies and pellets and some of the Nash particles.

Until next time!

After seeing that we only have a few weeks available for 2025, Dave and the fam wasted no time at all in securing their holiday for next year. This time they’ll be visiting in mid April which is one of my favourite times of year to be out fishing… nice!

Click here to see all their captures.