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This is what matters ☝️ Stuff the high pressure, over subscribed fishing of today, tolerating many annoyances just to chase a number - madness looking back! The atmosphere and wildlife is my new target!

Not quite a view from the bivvy door but from the swim to the next poke hole, gotta be one of the most carpy paths ever? - would love to see others. 😎

I keep thinking of the local Park Lakes near me, there would be many a Balnks had, but the rewards would be great. 3 Sisters (Boating) Park Lake Amberswood Park Lake Scotsman's Flash Pennigton Flash All are tricky waters but have some gooood, Pristine looking fish (weight irrelevant).

I'm kind of doing the opposite , Highy , in that I'm renewing my club ticket where there may be some 20lbers . It's like Nick says " it's my happy place " . Carp Anglers are in the minority at my club water ( it's predominately Match Anglers ) , so I feel I'm not competing with other Carp Anglers while trying to outwit the Carp ; and I enjoy the wildlife . I can always pay for a day ticket at my local runs water where I stand a much better chance of a 20 , or maybe if I believe the hype , a 30 . Sometimes I think I enjoy the planning / anticipation of going fishing more than actually sitting lakeside waiting for a bite ? . 😃

This is the 1....200 Acre.

I've been enjoying quiet banks so far this spring, but May sees an influx of new keen anglers so it will change for a short while. As soon as I can I'm gonna have a crack at the little river on site so that's another great option to get away from the crowds. My first from a river would be epic regardless of size 👍

Fishing (FULL STOP) is my happy place, regardless of catching, I know the Club Lake pretty well now, the last 4 years I've been on, I've only seen (to me) 3x 20's come out, there are some nice Mirrors in, only about 10 maximum, biggest be 19lb (whuch was out at weekend).....but aiming for that would be like 1 in 300 fish (maximums).

I'm having similar thoughts tbh quite fancy some fishing in the wilderness, there is loads I would still like to catch where I am but the busyness isn't doing it for me presently, I'm hoping to go this weekend but if it annoys me I might start considering my options.

Another 9'3" Sharpe's salmon spinning rod... these make great carp/barbel rods and I got it for a song... very powerful and resin impregnated... in great condition too

I can remember driving past Oxlease lake which was a syndicate water back in the day to get to Hunts corner lake and thinking wow that’s an inland sea 😳 Oxlease is 26 acres, then fishing Horseshoe Lake which I think is about 60 acres But 200 Acres Corr 😳…just looked up the dock I fish and that’s 30 Acres which I thought was about 20 Acres

I've cancelled my cyp membership for a bit, going through carpfixes back catalogue at the moment, then I'll probably switch back in a couple of months and catch up again 🙄

Actually watching now 🤣🤣

I can get in a tangle with one in the hopper 🤯 I don't think i could cope with two rods at once let alone 4

Imagine the tangles !!

I remember watching 1 on YouTube, about a dad n lad adventure. Also heard some monster things about Sale Water Park.

That makes 4 now... plus my 8 foot Sharpe too... cracking rods, powerful too

Setting up and more so packing away are the most off putting bit of angling Lucky for me I can get it round in one barrow load plus a bit of hand carrying , what I'm really pleased with is the MPV that just takes the whole barrow fully loaded in fact I could get four fully loaded barrows in it easy. Solid motor. Only got 58 on the clock with fsh and it annoys the green beans, practical motoring in a 2.9 diesel 6 person seats removed lol. https://youtu.be/ea68HcbP02o

Awesome capture mate, very well done 👍

I would normally wish you all the best of luck.. but iv sent the lot to Arsenal tonight.. and their in need of it mate 😏 A fishing trip is always better with proper coffee 👍

Not in any hurry to cast in, so set up the bivvy and chilling with a coffee

I suppose my capture of pawprint my target for 4 years deserves to be on this thread so here he is from a different angle. Next pic will be of my next target a pb common if I’m ever lucky enough to catch one that is 🤞

I prefer to think I taught him everything he knows… although I blanked… lol!

Nobody seems interested but thought I would announce that my plan actually worked and I caught him finally. I’m shocked and still finding it hard to say to myself well done you did it you targeted a new area done a bit of prep work in search of a certain fish and it paid off. Especially because this fish came out a couple weeks ago, it has been known to come out a couple times a year to be fair but I’m pretty sure that was only 1 out of the 4 years I been on there. I want to believe that I forced a quick capture! That was what I was trying to do. I watched Adam penning talk about it on a video and I had already invested a bit of time and effort and bait into this area that I just said to myself carry on you have nowhere else to go so just keep on and now it’s done. He took my bait in less than a minute so I believe he had been hanging around munching my prebait. I was still pulling my baiting pole back in when it went off and I thought somehow I had picked up the line pulling it back in as I had a massive drop back but a few seconds later my bobbin smashed the rod and I knew there was 1 on. If you read my first long old essay you will get the true extent of what’s been going on for me. I would rather have some likes for that to be honest and now I’m so glad I actually shared it. But if you just like a nice picture that’s cool because I know it’s ridiculously long. considering the weather tonight and it was dark I’m well happy with the photos I took a lot of them but sadly he had some damage on 1 side but still I’m over the moon and screamed the place down when he went in the net. Was only me on the lake so it was ok. Paw Print 33lb 14 oz Lord of Hook lake 🤣 Love this pic Only sad thing about it all is that my time on there is up now really and I just paid for a new year starting on may 1st. What a lake I really loved my time on there and I doubt I will find another place as magical as there any time soon. Danny

if anyone is interested I have a little plan for this year coming. firstly a little ( edit ) little no not little huge lol ) story about my journey so far. I have spent last 3 years on a small intimate wind protected silted up estate lake called hook lake in Hertfordshire. I plan for this year to be my last year on there regardless of if I catch the fish I joined for or not. when I joined it was my first real go at what’s considered by many as a hard lake to fish! and I was about to learn the hard way. Bad thing for me was I started fishing when the lockdown rules finally allowed us to start doing nights. I dropped in first session and only by luck had 2 fish straight away and that set me up thinking hey I’m not too bad at this but little did I know I was about to be hit hard with a reality check. I think I done 2 nights a week every week after that up until November so say 6 months and I only managed another 5 fish.So less than 1 a month so like more than 8 nights per fish. what did I learn ? 1. Carp from small lakes are clever! Like really clever! Or maybe it’s anglers being dumb ? But most times I could pull up at the lake see a couple of anglers on and go look as far away from them as possible and I would find fish straight away. I could almost every time guess where the carp would be from where the anglers were set up which was always as far away from them as possible. Sometimes when there was more anglers on the lake the fish were nowhere to be found ( I think I know where they were hiding now and this year with that and what I have learned myself so far I plan to take full advantage of this😉) but still even though I could find them I still couldn’t manage to hook 1 or stalk 1 or even set up without spooking them off somewhere else( I was yet to learn what it takes to master the art of absolute stealth) went as far as the waggler and also free lining. 2. Weather! With this lake the main problem in my opinion is the dissolved oxygen in the water. Hot summer days with barely any wind hitting the water along with silt releasing gas loads of silvers no weed growing high air pressure all led to carp on the surface struggling for oxygen. To the amateur like I was you would say let’s hit them with a floater 🤣. No chance these fish were just trying to stay alive no way were they interested in feeding at all.this lake has suffered devastating fish kills in the past. Last year and maybe years before I don’t know but last year for sure they done a siltex job on it and it has been alot better for the fish I have witnessed them dropping down and having a quick feed even in extreme temperatures but still get your head torch on at 3 am and you can still find them at times gulping air not interested in nothing apart from breathing. 3. ( remember this is what did I learn) another important thing I learned so far was to monitor weather and only drop in and fish when the weather was in my favour. This meant I needed low air pressure which normally comes with wind normally rain which all helps oxygen levels and in this lake can spark a feeding spell from the fish and when they feed they will feed hard but that’s not it done yet. I learnt about storm rain and how it can deplete oxygen but still I had to fail before I learnt about this. 4.getting them to accept a bait. Last year I didn’t fish from the start of may to the start of September. But I was down the lake twice a week when I could manage to sneak on without anyone seeing and getting my bait in there. At first many times I would turn up mid week and even then there would be people on and I would have to turn around drive off and I had wasted my time. 5 . washed out baits. As I said this lake is a silt hole. So if you drop in freshly unfrozen boilies They are going to sink to the bottom and suck up all that dirty silt flavour into the bait! Not saying the carp won’t eat the bait still they will and they do but in my mind I want them to love the bait especially when you know the syndicate managers are feeding a pellet into the lake which soon becomes safe to the fish, I have been there before sneaky watching with no motor in the car park watching where they feed them 🤣 but I learnt that they feed them all over the lake not just in 1 spot. I even waited for the time to come and sneaked up to rubbish bags and found out what pellet they were feeding the fish and I thought I had cracked the code but all I realised when I bought the same pellet that unless the carp were eating them within 1 hour they became food for the silvers. Mush, so that was forgotten about. I was sick of turning up after driving to the lake and out of respect for the anglers fishing turning around and going home with washed out baits which made me worry about if they was becoming deactivated or what not. I wanted my bait to already have sucked up enough juice so that they couldn’t suck up anymore in my mind making them even more attractive for these wary fish. So I started setting an alarm for 2 am and going to the lake even while other anglers were there sleeping and being prepared to sneak onto the lake and plop in 1 boilie at a time if that’s what I had to do. The other anglers were all blanking anyway I wasn’t doing any harm I’m not like that I wouldn’t do it if I was doing harm I just knew that these fish wouldn’t be feasting on these anglers baits hard unless they was feeding them all the time like I was. 6. Dropping in at the right time. This is the most important thing I have learned. Weather conditions spots where carp are willing to feed(although with washed out baits they will in my opinion pick them up from anywhere in the lake as I have caught from swims where even the owners say nobody caught a fish out of there for as long as they can remember) getting the carp loving the bait all are part of the key to success on this lake. After learning honestly by myself and with the help of google I already said I didn’t fish from the start of may to the start of September I dropped in when weather conditions were favourable and in one session had the same amount of fish I had in my whole first year on this lake, 7 carp. I was over the moon. I had more fish than some anglers had in years. I caught a carp that had been missing for a long long time it wasn’t huge just 16lb but it is a beauty if you check the hook lake website I’m on there and the owners wrote a little bit about the captures. after my capture of it they named it the leviathon which I’m quite proud of. After that I thought these fish love the bait I’m gonna empty the place and decided to ignore weather and go hard. I blanked 3 sessions after that. Until full moon low pressure big winds late in November and dropped in after switching and feeding a more digestible bait ( that’s my bait guy not me he assured me it will be better and it was) I dropped in and had 4 fish in a session. I imagine if i had had the help from people on this chat room I would have seen such success earlier and that’s what I’m moving onto now. so finally my plan( got carried away sorry) most people I assume won’t read this far anyway unless I’m a good storyteller I don’t know I hope so I think my pal salinkodog might do 😉. I know I probably got the name wrong but I’m sure you don’t mind it’s the thought that counts. Mk so I was talking to you recently and you said to me some fish hang around a certain area. I have had most of the stock from this lake now a lot of repeats the commons I’m not sure how many it’s hard to tell apart from by weight but 1 mirror I have had 5 times. Another 4 times and quite a few 2 times you get the picture. So I was told by salinkodog and I will admit 1 of the bailiffs on the lake who I will also admit has quizzed me up to what I am doing wanting to get the same success which I am proud of to be honest as he’s been on the lake for 20 years or more, I was told I need to fish in 1 area if I want to catch the carp that has evaded capture from me for the past 3 years. So this year coming that’s what I’m going to do. But, I’m doing more than that I recently took a massive anchor like rake down to where this fish has been caught before and spent a good 2 hours chucking it out into the lake and literally dragging back logs off the bottom savage roots and all sorts and clearing a couple spots which are incastable by rod and can only be reached by baiting pole pushing under over hanging trees or setting up on the other bank and fishing a rod length out which I can’t be doing anymore I can’t be staying in stealth mode for like 48 hours at a time it ain’t healthy for the mind but I have done it and if necessary I can use this skill again in my career but it’s not enjoyable. so I have literally raked the hell out of 2 spots and upon doing this I noticed some massive undercut banks. God knows how far the banks are undercut but I learned that for 3 years I have been walking past this feature thinking I know it all and really I have been ignorant and not thorough enough in my searching. I also found a considerably deep hole right by an undercut bank and if I’m right I’m convinced the carp are using this area. I was literally swinging this anchor like rake at least 2 foot under my feet where I was standing. I have not seen anyone fishing either of the spots I have prepared for this year so I have just started dropping my chosen bait on them. I know the bait when I prepare it the way I do the carp love it. I mix water with condensed milk add a dash of vanilla extract taste it myself and it’s delicious, not at all overpowering and ok fish might be different but me I wanna keep tasting it more and more so this is what I wash out my boilies with they end up tutti frutti vanilla cream. This lake has story’s of carp going missing and I have managed to find one of them who knows I might find more this year because this hole is deep and in my opinion must have been excavated by carp.Bring back the rake through it it was taking ages to hit the bottom and it was like clay for the first time I had clumps of clay like stuff sticking to the rake and I’m no expert but in a lake predominantly silty and choddy I find a random deep hole and the rakes coming back clumped up with clay like material I have heard this is a good thing ? why is this hole deeper than anywhere else I know of on the lake ? And why is it the only place I have found clay like substance? Why are the banks there really undercut? I’m no expert but it screams out carp getting special nutrients from clay and digging it out making it deeper than anywhere else. Maybe there is more clay around the lake but as I said this area is left alone and never pressured as far as I have seen and maybe they choose to go there for what they need. Also where this spot is there’s a huge oak tree which over the years has had massive branches snap off and crash down into the lake deterring anglers from fishing there. I would certainly never set up in that swim because of this and also as I only fish when weather conditions are perfect that’s usually high winds and I’m bad enough on there with the smaller trees let alone this huge oak tree which you only have to look at for a second to see it’s previous snap offs and it screams danger. who knows maybe this little plan might lead to nothing I tell you 1 thing if it does I will be man enough to come on here and tell anyone who is interested but I’m convinced I have found an area on a small lake that has been ignored by everyone else. My campaign starts from the 27th March when my winter ticket ends but I have started baiting and preparation already I will reply to my post here when it’s due wish me luck at least Danny Hearn

The things we do in search of the next nice carp. The reservoir I fish is full of water atm, we cant launch from the sailing club, so have to barrow several loads through loads of mud to get to the boats. My average time from the load up until being all set up is around 5 hours??? Crazy. Considering it's only 30 minutes away from home. Enjoy and good luck mate.