Having baited up my spot for the past three weeks of February, every four days at a minimum, I was keen to get down to my swim over the weekend and do a couple of dawn starts.
Saturday morning was dreary and overcast, a gloomy increase in visibility the only sign that the dawn had broken at all. The rain was so fine as to be almost imperceptible; however, within an hour or so my trousers were once again soaked through, clinging limply to my legs in the damp, still, cold air. It was then that I looked up to the grey sky over the body of water to my right and noticed the fine mist of rain for the first time, blowing in the gusts of wind high overhead.
Over the past weeks I have baited up with more than just hempseed and tiger nuts this year, including various additions such as large halibut pellets and some homemade boilies. I have rolled some boilies in four separate batches using the same (homemade) base mix, but using slightly different ingredients to vary the break-up time, solubility and the taste. In addition, I have raided the local pheasant feed posts stationed around my house in the surrounding fields – as the local Estate sees fit to send folk trampling across my garden fence in their various hunting pursuits I have no qualms about doing this whatsoever – and this free grain, mostly wheat in truth, has been boiled up with some layers pellets and molasses and thrown in at intervals over the month. Different visits have seen me depositing different meals in the same spot. I have also mixed up some black shellfish groundbait, some Weetabix (definitely a great ingredient, not only for the betaine, but also for the additional vitamins and mineral content) and even a little sweetcorn, the varied diet covering just about every possible dietary requirement a carp could require: protein, carbohydrates, lipids, vitamins and minerals. I deliberately covered all the bases in the hope of luring in the largest residents of the lake by offering them some form of sustenance that they could not find elsewhere.
SANDY BANK SWIM
My affliction, an annual occurrence in the Spring, has been worse than usual this year and I have read extensively on all things carp. I have recently learnt that a lack of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) is the usual cause of ‘broken back disease’ in fish. A number of carp I have seen over the years have this condition, often Common, rather than Mirror, carp for some reason that I can only presume is co-incidence. They are usually known in their respective haunts as ‘The Kink-Backed Common’, or something similar. One of the Common carp I declined to catch last year at The Pallisade, due to it evidently being in a state of recovery from three recent stab wounds along its back typical of a cormorant attack, had this characteristic. With this deficiency in mind, I had rolled my boilies using freshly squeezed orange juice – not only do carp love oranges, they are acidic which causes a noticeable pH change in the water (assisting with chemoreception) and the pepsin within the juice reacts in spectacular fashion with the albumin in egg whites. By using certain choice ingredients in the base mix and preparing and mixing the components in a certain order, I had hoped my boilies would achieve an effective reaction underwater that would entice even the largest and most wary of carp to investigate. Building on previous experiments, I tested all four boilie batches in glasses of water. The results were much as I had anticipated.
The evening before, on Friday, I had sat and watched my spot for a little while prior to baiting up. A few bubbles and small slicks of oil had surfaced, implying that something or other had found the food and was having a go at it. Buoyed by this sighting, I had re-baited and I had done so once more upon my arrival this morning. After an hour or so, there was a very large oil slick, covering almost a foot or water. These slicks are not caused by the carp themselves, but usually form when the oily pellets, hemp seeds and so on are being shuffled about on the lake bottom. However, they can be very misleading as I have discovered on previous sessions on gravel pits over the years, where I have seen oily slicks materialise for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Suffice to say, nothing took my baited hook, my hair-rigged tiger nuts remaining on the lakebed undisturbed. I switched to a homemade boilie after a few hours, but nothing happened. About 11am, wet and cold, I headed off home to meet my better half and do the shopping run.
Sunday was a very different day, bright and cold, the dawn breaking in spectacular fashion over the hills. A burning globe of fire in the pale light greeted me, as I hurtled back towards my chosen fishing spot. Upon arrival, the place looked completely dead. Nothing stirred, anywhere, and I soon discovered the weatherman had been right after all.
For some reason, Accuweather had forecast 8am-9am to be the coldest part of the forthcoming day or preceding night, with the temperature dropping to sub-zero levels. I had found this hard to believe whilst reading it the previous evening on my laptop; however, in short order I could certainly believe it. Despite being extensively layered up and donned in my usual two pairs of trousers, fingerless gloves, cap, woollen hoodie (ultra-warm) and green anorak, I soon became painfully aware that I was sat in the equivalent of a freezer. As the nature of the place means that remaining still and quiet in a small space is a necessity, I soon began to lose feeling in the exposed tips of my fingers and nose, before the numbness started creeping into my upper legs. I soon began shivering like an addict in withdrawal.
Nothing stirred in my baited area. About 8am a crash in the centre of the lake caused me to glance over sharply. Nothing but rings of water were visible, spreading out in perfect circles across the still surface. The tufted ducks were trilling across the water, whilst a pair of ducks were keeping to themselves over on the left bank. Three coots are living on the lake at present. This is clearly one too many, as the male of the paired couple spends much of his time with his head lowered, chasing the other male coot around the lake in circles.
The temperature of the lake water has risen about one degree since last week, the thermometer now reading 6 degrees Celsius after resting for half an hour in the waters edge. I realised on Saturday when the huge inlet pipe suddenly began spewing discharge into the lake, an event which appears to occur at completely random intervals from my observations, that there was no possible way any stratification could occur in this five acre body of water. I wondered if the discharge entering the lake was possibly warmer than the current water, but despite holding my hand against the metal pipe I could not determine the fact one way or the other. The general water visibility is slowly increasing as Spring starts to unfold and it has now increased to about three feet.
Although I have yet to see a carp this year, I already have a target fish, the dark coloured Mirror. I doubt that there are more than six or seven carp in the lake over twenty pounds and it is certainly possible that the carp I glimpsed one day last year really is only the one carp worth targeting in the five acres. With such a very small head of fish to target, the lack of visibility underwater and the huge limitations caused by the dead trees sticking out of the water all around the banksides, it is currently proving quite a challenge during the coldest month of the year. Last year I did not catch anything notable until mid-April and I feel that I am currently too early.
Arriving at dawn, spodding out a lot of bait and sitting on it for the day is not a strategy that I want to adopt. The depth of water will spread the particles across a large area and there are no ‘nuisance’ fish of any kind to hoover up the bait. It would be very difficult to judge how much bait to use – bearing in mind I want to catch one carp from about six whilst their metabolism is still very slow and not to feed the entire population for a week. Another difficulty would be to get the correct amount of bait down on the lakebed in a sufficiently small area at such great depth – enough to draw the carp in from wherever it may be but not to leave bait to go mouldy on the lakebed.
As it proved last time, it may be maggots that prove to be the solution. Not only did they trigger the fish to get down and feed, they also have a habit of burying themselves into the lakebed in short order which is a fact I may be able to use to my advantage.
I think my current tactics of baiting up my spot regularly will ultimately pay off and catch me the big girl, but at the moment the lady of the lake has completely shut up shop.
Waterside Tales 