Jone5y

You mean to tell me that Olivia doesn't actually want me to go over to her place and check out her plumbing?

Here's a picture including all the items above in their respective pouch and my other tackle pouch which has all my tackle for river fishing (chub, barbel, and perch). The bottle of scotch is for scale purposes obviously.

To scale back you really need to decide what you actually need for the vast majority of your fishing. You also need to be content with the fact they you will never cover every possibility. I really do not enjoy carrying loads of unnecessary things in anything I do - whether that be fishing tackle or tools for a job. If I can buy something that has multiple uses then I will prioritise that. When I stopped carp fishing exclusively, my items of end tackle all fit into a 9" by 6" zipped bag which I have attached a picture of. The little box has a few beads, swivels etc in, the bit of pipe lagging as a few pre-tied rig bits pinned on, and the cut down pva tube has the hook section of hinge stiff rig/chod rigs in - which can be used for either rig obviously. I have three packets of hooks only. I think most people would shudder at the idea of taking so few items of terminal tackle with them. Personally, I always found it very relaxing to have a very simple approach to work from. Granted I may add items as a situation dictates but I never found myself feeling the need to try something for no reason whatsoever. I would advise seriously considering concocting a very basic approach to carp fishing (i.e. deciding on three rigs that cover most situations you can envision) and decide EXACTLY what you need to do that.

My advice for anybody fishing big public lakes (or big lakes in general) is to buy a bike that you do not mind being stolen. Leave it at the lake.

Dress your dog up as a ferret, there's no rule against ferrets. Sadly, the rule of no guns rules me out.

A basic way to reduce NHS annual spending - print all letters in greyscale and save money on ink.

Apostrophe by Frank Zappa. What do I win? A small tip for testing your baits in water. Try to use river/lake/rain water instead of tap water, I've seen some big differences when comparing (e.g. they break down slower in tap water).

Get some second hand Daiwa Emblem ST - the old "gold" ones. They're cheap, reliable, and no one will bother nicking them. The line clips are pretty bad though. I reckon you can get a set of three off of ebay for about £200 tops. You can throw them in bushes, in the water, in mud, off a cliff, in font of an artic lorry on the M40 (don't do that), and you'll never care one bit.

I've been reading about bivvys lately and one which seems to get good reviews is the Tacklebox Long Top. Personally, I've never used one but it might be worth a look - it seems very lightweight stripped out. One plus I can think of is that the Tacklebox's customer service is top class.

I can see Ian throwing a few shapes to this on the bank after a few too many (or too few) bottles of Rioja.

Yes I understand how acoustic devices work as I've spent an awful lot of time analysing data collected using moored ADCPs. The two-way travel time is clearly displayed on the Y-axis in the form of distance below the reference (the surface). I was just trying to figure out if you could ever determine whether a detected object was stationary or moving, which we seem to agree that you cannot. Furthermore, I understand that the colorscale denotes the strength of the signal, but how is that determined in these deeper devices? Usually it's fairly common to use the correlation between the pulse of the signal and the return, whereby the bed can be estimated by a band of very high correlation which is indicative of a "hard return".

If I'm reading that plot correctly then the x-axis represents the spatial domain rather than the temporal domain. As such I don't think you can infer that an object is stationary or not. Also, does anybody know what is actually displayed on the plot? Correlation as a function of height above the bed?

I had to take a detour past a lake on a nature reserve yesterday because a section of the lake I was intending to look at was closed for nesting birds. I decided I would sit in the bird hide which overlooks the lake and watch for a bit. My rustiness for carp angling was very noticeable because I kept mistaking pond skaters for carp basking like an idiot. However, eventually I saw what I thought might be a fish so I decided to shin about 20 feet up a tree to have a look - initially I tried to climb on the roof of the bird hide but the plastic roofing wasn't very strong and my foot nearly went through it. Sure enough, there was a carp skirting the reeds and heading straight to the bird hide. Then another joined and I was faced with the prospect of a couple of carp swimming around a lake which is very much no fishing and has no signs of activity other than an active log sheet in the bird hide. Not one to be deterred, I decided to hack my way through the undergrowth around the end of the lake furthest from the bird hide. However, I wasn't doing this because I solely wanted to find more fish. I wanted to find the positions of the lake which the bird hide cannot see. I was also looking for places to bury/stash gear so that I don't have to take much with me when I finally decide to poach the lake. There's nothing those crusty old farts with binoculars can do about it. My advice to you would be to adopt the same mindset as me. Channel that childhood mischief you almost certainly once had and fish it regardless of what some chump with a clipboard says. Treat it like a military operation. Gaffa tap some knackered old rods and reels high in large trees, and dig out holes to stash gear in and then put a false lid on it. Tie bricks to some old stainless and submerge it in the margins/reed beds. I would recommend that you phone the council or whoever own it and ask when the work parties or volunteer days are so that you can avoid fishing during this period. Learn to speak broken English in a foreign language so that you can pretend you couldn't read the "NO FISHING" sign properly. Do anything other than not fishing the lake. You clearly want to else you wouldn't have made this thread. Time to grow a pair and do it. What's the worst that can happen?

Those dynamite jar/tins are a complete rip-off though so I'd recommend buying your peanuts from an online bait distributor. For example; 500ml of Dynamite Frenzied Peanuts (a significant portion being liquid rather than actual peanuts) - £5 5kg of prepared peanuts from AA Baits (other distributors are available) - £12