Fishing report from Wayne & Kim

Another amazing week of fishing!

This week we welcomed Wayne and Kim to the venue for their 3rd visit.  Wayne loves his fishing and did the tuition day twice. Wayne wasted no time at all in getting off the mark and messaged me with capture no.1 (Hyphen) at 40 lbs before 5pm on Saturday… Before the day was out he had the sturgeon and a catfish and decided to retire to the lodge for the night… Now that is a quick start for the week!

That flurry of captures very much set the tone for the session… let’s just say it was busy!

Wayne used similar tactics to Jeff (2 weeks ago) of moving small bait traps about on a regular basis to keep the runs coming. But Wayne took it to the next level and used a Raymarine echo sounder to actively hunt for carp. It’s fascinating to see a feeding carp with its tail up and head down! Bait boats, with or without an echo sounder, are a great tool but they don’t make you a better angler. They certainly don’t make up for blunt hooks and iffy rigs. You still have to do everything else right and that’s where Wayne showed how good an angler he is.

Wayne loves a running inline setup with pickup indicator paired with the blowback multi rig and he used that and only that all session. He sharpens his own hooks but he also changes them frequently too. That’s the real edge. In total, Wayne used over 60 hooks.

Based on the success of other anglers this year, Wayne adopted the small trap approach and it worked incredibly well. He did tweak the levels, some days going heavier, some days lighter as the conditions shifted. He trickled some bait along the margins but mostly it was just a question of setting a small trap in the right place. 

Wayne ended up having 8 – 9 spots on the go by the end of the week (obviously he only fished 3 at a time). After each capture, he switched to another spot. He elected not to bait up the spot he had fished but he did end up returning to the same 8 – 9 spots on a repeat basis. I don’t think the carp knew what had hit them.  

We were starting to worry about our Sammy because he went on the missing list for the first seven weeks of the season but he was back with a bang this week multiple times. Still I’ve always said that a feeding fish is a happy fish. This week I think Sammy must have been on cloud nine. 

Click here to see all the amazing pictures from this week.

The small traps approach also minimised interference from the catfish as Wayne only caught 3 of them. That’s a right result considering the number of carp he caught. He was very strict with the amount of bait he used though: 1 – 2 small handfuls for a total of 12kgs for the week. Any more and the catfish would be on him. Placing traps near actively feeding carp gave him an edge because there was less time for the catfish to find the food as the carp were never very far away.

Wayne caught a lot of carp but he still treasured each one and did a fantastic job of looking after them. Kim was on hand at all times to help with photos, weights and carp care. They worked brilliantly as a team and as a result we’ve got some amazing pictures of some very special carp.

I also wanted to point out that Wayne, like Jeff, did not fish a single night but he maximised every minute of the session and worked his butt off to keep those bobbins dancing.

It was wonderful to see Kim and Wayne again and thanks for making the week a special one for us by sharing so much with us.