Fishing report: Garry & Trish

Some very productive fishing despite the warmer weather !

This week we welcomed Garry and Trish to the venue for their first holiday with us. Garry was like a kid at Christmas as he’d been waiting a very long time to visit us so after a good chat and walking around the grounds we left them to get installed.

Best fishing holiday ever – 100%.

Garry is an experienced carp angler and fished a lot in the 80s and 90s but he’s been away from the sport for a number of years. He wanted to make the most of his time with us so he booked a day with me. Even before I met up with him for the tuition he’d banked 3 catfish, the sturgeon and 3 carp… . I mean talk about being busy!

One of the goals of the tuition was for Garry to up his feature finding game so we focussed a little more on that and he learned a lot of new techniques very quickly. Along the way we covered a lot of the details that really make a difference. Garry was already a good angler but he was very excited by what he learned and he could see how a few tweaks could transform his angling back home.

Bait & Rigs

Garry ties great combi rigs but on a venue where hook sharpness is key, combi rigs are time consuming and expensive in terms of the quantity of hooklink required. This was obviously going to be a busy week so Garry switched to the blow back multi so that he could change his hooks easily while re-using the hooklink multiple times. As usual he combined that with an inline running rig with a tell tale indicator. It worked very well but Garry also noted that he got done a few times. I’ve seen this before at that time of year. Mr. Carp definitely ups his rig spitting game when the water warms up!

Garry used freezer baits that he brought over with him along with some particles and pellets. He was happy to continue to follow our “small trap” guidelines and that very much fitted in with his ‘bite at a time’ style.

Getting warmer!

The water temperature was on the rise again this week after a period of cooler weather. We have always struggled to maintain good oxygen levels at this time of year so I can’t quite wrap my head around what the oxygen probe was telling me at the start of the week as we’d managed to hold 10mg/l of oxygen at 21.5°C… as a morning low… without any aeration… that’s very uncharacteristic.

I have no doubt it’s a result of the improvements we’ve made to our fishery management this year and it goes a long way towards explaining how well the venue has been fishing but that doesn’t mean things can’t take a turn for the worse so we remain very vigilant. It’s not so much the daytime lake temperatures that are the issue, it’s the overnight temperature that drives the water temperature higher as the heat can’t dissipate. The overnight temperatures were fairly sensible this week but that’s going to change for the worse at the weekend.

Looking at the weather forecast you’d never pick this week to go fishing with warm still days and higher temperatures but because the oxygen was good, so was the fishing! Garry had very modest expectations for his first trip and rightly so. The objective is always just to catch one, then everything else is a bonus. In the end, Garry caught loads and he also said that he’d missed some opportunities.

Experimenting with “the washing line”

One experiment that Garry tried that didn’t work great was the washing line method. This is something I’ve only ever seen one other angler attempt here and I’ve only had a go once myself. Although the angler that did use it caught 3 or 4 fish, he dropped a few along the way. That’s exactly what happened when I tried it. Garry had a very similar result, landing 1 but missing 4 bites (the carp was gone before he could get to the rod). 

Catfish love a snowman!

We’ve been seeing far fewer catfish caught of late thanks to the “small trap” approach but Garry seemed to be a bit of a catfish magnet. I did notice that he was using snowman rigs with bright coloured popups. This might look very carpy but the catfish were on that like a shot. Luckily Garry really wasn’t bothered about what he caught as it was all good sport but if you want to be a bit more selective about what you catch then I’d think twice about a snowman rig unless it was made up with a dull coloured popup. He did switch to dull coloured bottom bait towards the end of the week but by then the catfish had got such a taste for his traps they still piled into the spots!

Big congratulations to Garry who got his approach 100% spot on and made the most of this incredible fishing window. He worked hard at his fishing until the very end of the week and got rewarded handsomely for his dedication to detail.

Garry & Trish had an amazing holiday and loved every second of it, they really didn’t want to leave! It was a pleasure to meet them and we are very excited that they’re already talking about their next visit.