admacdo

My fishing buddy was so enthused with our night's poundage, he took his brother the next day and they seemed to be still on the boil. He convinced me that I should go back today as he'd peppered the area again with his own concoction of carp confectionery. We have always joked about nothing happening until at least three oclock, so I got to sit down and make some hooklinks. I'm a convert to those little sprung holders for $3.75 from Big W. It seems that some fish can't tell the time. At 2.45pm, my rod closest to the snags went off. It wasn't big, but seemed to be pretty fast. When it got close to the bank, I saw a flash of golden red colour. Yeehaa! My first Koi! My bankside companion got his first mirror of about 2.7 kg. This was a fully scaled mirror without the bare patches that my little one had. And then the biggest surprise yet. A redfin on corn! Even my girlfriend was convinced to come and sit by the water. Having never caught anything that she can remember, even after being on quite a few fishing trips, she bought in her first fish. A lethargic 3kg one which didn't give much snag hunting trouble. So it's been a good indication to us that a bait campaign is worth the few minutes of effort and cost of preparation.

Well, hopefully, you guys were all out fishing last night and have tales to tell. Anybody? Now that I'm planning my fishing trips around the lunar cycle for serious nights out, I had the option to do some slightly more serious pre baiting on the selected area. I figured this time that I'd give the locale a serious distribution of the various intended baits in fine particulate form a day before, then come back at lunchtime the next day. This would be for a closer concentration of particulate and ground bait in the right area. Then of course, the normal high percentage of groundbait in the target areas right at the start of the fishing session after work the same day. I've never bothered to be so detailed before, but with creamed corn, sardines in oil and tuna oil soaked chook pellets being so cheap at the local supermarket, I figured it was a fair investment in time and money. Even if nothing happened, it was worth having a go as a learning experience. I know that at there are a few people that fish our favourite spot as sometimes they leave rod holders cut from sticks there. We've also had a Chinese lady come up and tell us about her fishing. On the previous day, I found two Vietnamese guys with a medium sized carp heading towards their car. After a brief chat, we realised who each other were and I asked them how they'd been doing. They eat their carp... (Blerk!) and had also caught two koi there the previous day. These were now at their home in a tank. So Chris_the_lad was right. That's twice he's said that things are the way they are and I've found it to be so. They also told me of getting broken off an hour or so previously and also having lost a rod when it got pulled in... hmmmm... this could be fun. The next day during lunch, I went back and spombed the intended line distance radius after setting up the gear to the right distance. There was another guy from NSW there, with his hammock set up, just snoozing. He turned and watched with interest as I made a delicious looking creamed corn, chicken pellet and pureed sardines in oil milkshake. Then again, he was downwind, so he might have just smelled it and decided not to vomit in his hammock. Once I filled the spomb and had several deposits out, he must have twigged what was going on. "VERY CLEVER!" he said, and then got out of the hammock. I basically explained what was going on and he was very interested as he was a retired engineer and didn't really "get" fishing. When he realised how much information I was incorporating, his attitude towards it was significantly changed. He might just buy himself a rod... It was rather entertaining to see a small bit of sardine get pushed across the top of the water by the surface tension being disturbed by the oil coming out of one side. No wonder that stuff works so well. Everyone here must know what it's like waiting for a day of work to finish before a session starts. Particularly if you're wondering if you'll rock up to find that you've done the work for someone else.... This was not helped by an SMS arriving from my fishing buddy who had started at 3pm that he'd caught a Koi! I asked him to keep it in a bucket for me. So after much dumping of his fishing gear on the ground, I now have my private koi collection at home.. Regardless, I got sick of being at work pretty quickly and explained my lack of motivation to my supervisor. He's an understanding sort of chap and just said "Goodbye" Turning up at the spot, I put the final mix of heavier groundbait into the target areas. My fishing colleague was apparently two up with the Koi and another banking. I hadn't asked him about the weight. I did have thoughts about being seriously geeky and updating things on here as they went via my new netbook and 3G connection, so had it on my chair, waiting for an opportune moment. Quickly, rods were set up and I, having chosen the prebaiting mix, went instantly to corn. My companion was campaigning bread with cheese. He was having a bit of interest, but no big takes or anything you'd be tempted to strike at. Thanks to loop to loop settings and pre tied hook links, I was rigged and in reasonably quickly. And this was where the fun began. One of my lines still had the distance marker on it which corresponds to the spomb distance. Whenever that line hit the water and got wound in to the mark, it started getting hits. I felt them even as I put the custom line hangers on. The action was fast and furious for the next few hours. With no wind, there were copious amounts of line bites and takes. On a few occasions, I had one carp on and the bite indicators were chirping away on the rod in the pod. Eventually, I actually considered taking the third rod in as it was getting a bit silly. Details are a bit fuzzy but some of the highlights included feeling hits on the bait while I was trying to untangle a big birdsnest. There were some rather emotional associations with that. What if a big carp latched on while I'm playing cat's cradle with braid? Which of my fingers are my favourites? Having to strike two rods at almost the same time. Passing rods around and under others while both trying to get fish in. Being broken off by something that REALLY didn't want to visit the scales. It was like an audition for the Biggest Loser. One interesting occurance was the gentlest of takes that I wasn't sure about. I figured to do a bait check and reeled in. I thought that I had a weed or something until it got within about 4 feet of the bank. Then it took off like a Heavy Metal fan at a Justin Beiber concert. That was the biggest of the night at about 3.8 kilos. ( I have all the weights and rough times that they were caught, but sometimes it got a bit frantic..) There was one bantam weight carp that fought like a heavyweight. Six times he stripped line against the drag and headed for the rocks that had broken off the apparent mini submarine I'd hooked earlier. There are branches that overhang the water to one side and although it was dark, I was sure that I was clear of them. After hanging on to one reasonably long run and holding the rod tip as close to the water as I dared to avoid the branches, there was suddenly a snap of slack line. *$^@#&! A second break off! I swore as I heard something go "plop" into the water and then the tension came on again... just as hard. WTF? Then I realised that the braid had actually sawed through a small branch that I'd hooked over. Oh well. Less shrubbery to have to avoid later. Previously our best combined total was 21kg of carp. When I had got to 22 kg by myself, I was only slighly ahead of my fishing buddy. I was helped by two rather fat ones. The suprise express train carp looked the biggest and I was sure that it would clock in at at least 5 kilos to deliver a killing blow in my total clocked in at 3.9k. I felt seriously robbed. The smallest fish was mine. It was 750 grams. I'm thinking of starting the carp in the lake used to eating pizza and chocolate icecream. If I can get this food into the water in sufficient qantities and combine it with a large lounge chair and satellite television, I'm sure I can pile the kilograms onto those carp in no time. They'll be bigger than two Oprah Winfreys in less than six months. I know what you're thinking, but it happened to my friends wife as soon as they got married. HEY! Maybe I should just feed them wedding cake? It seems that carp stay reasonably skinny until they get to around 70cm or so and then start to pork outwards at a faster rate than they grow lengthways. Normally I find it nice to be able to run a tape measure beside them and record that as well, but there was a blue light disco on over at my rod pod for most of the time and I wasn't game to do anything that took too long past getting a the digits on the scale to lock and write it down. Odd things: An early capture was an odd looking carp. At first I thought it was a perch. We looked at it closely and it appeared to be more blue than the bronzy / green/ silverish colour of the commons. It also had a more pronounced dorsal bulge although it was only about a foot long. It didn't have the dorsal fin leading edge spike that so often fouls the net though. Any thoughts chaps? I had to give my fishing buddy extra points for his capturing the mutant. So now I've seen it all from this spot. (Or all that I think I could see. Koi, Mirror and blue mutant weird ass carp) There were three occasions when I had very energetic takes. Hard enough to pop my rod up to the next eye into the V of the bite detector. Luckily, I wasn't trying to update facebook at that point but eventually I had to give away all thoughts of getting online. In all, we caught 55kg (122lb) worth of fish. There were none caught twice as they were all different weights except for two of 1.5kg caught at pretty much the same time. 29kg in 14 carp for me. 12 carp, one koi and one mutant blue variety for my offsider. Given the energy of the two (or maybe one) that broke both of us off on the same spot, we probably easily could have broken the 60kg barrier. My offsider was keen to stay, but at 10.30pm, I couldn't handle it any more. Plus, he's self employed. He did say that it was likely to disillusion us for any future fishing trips and I'm sure that it will. I've certainly never experienced anything like it, even when fly fishing crappies in Florida. Pretty much constant harrassment of the tiny bits of corn. It actually got to the point where was pre-threading our home made bait needles (Made with the big needles from Woolworths nicked across the eye with a dremel disk) with four bits of corn so that I could be back in again quickly. Today I'm sore across the back, but I have a fine appreciation for my trusty hook of choice. The #10 Mustad Viking 540. It's sharp, tough and bends instead of snapping. Surely someone else must have done something also last night, or did I have all the planets in alignment?

Ah, dude. That's awesome! Was it close to that dark bronze in real life or is the camera giving it a colour cast? And can we have a line weight, bait used and fight report please if you're up to it?

You spooked me a bit with that last post Chris. So when my 500 metres of 15lb braid turned up two days ago, I resurrected the trusty old Aero 6010 and decided to see how much of the spool it would hold. As it turns out.... All of it, filled just past the point of where I'd be happy with it. A few longer casts and retrieval under normal tension will settle it down perfectly. So if I've got the drag set to slip at about 5lb and say, a fish can spool 400 metres of line after a 100 meter cast, it's managed an output of 6560 foot / lb of energy. That's an equivalent of moving 6560lbs (2975kg) a distance of one foot or one pound a distance of 6560 feet. While that's not especially interesting in terms of being able to relate to, imagine the amount of energy involved in benchpressing 100kg (224lb) just once is about 448 foot pound of energy. hmmm. If I can find a carp in the lake that can put out enough energy to bench press 100 kg 14 times to make (not quite) the 6560 ft / lb of force required to spool me, I'm going to give up fishing with bait and just use a few sticks of gelignite and a hefty dose of body armour.

Yes. People forget about the accumlative pressure of winding nylon line onto forms. I haven't seen any modern reels damaged, but I have my suspicions about some of the ancient Alvey reels I've seen in sheds. Odd cracks. In my model glider days doing F3b and F3j, we'd regularly wind in 100 metres of stressed 200lb and above nylon line onto winches powered by car starter motors. The winch drums that were not solid metal failed quite rapidly. One made of 16 x 100mm x 10mm bolts was pulled into an hourglass shape. Ah, those were the days. Fishing is much cheaper. I'm yet to see 4000 dollars worth of fishing gear hit the ground so hard that it needs a shovel to clean up the mess.

Mono packing would be great insurance and would be simple to do too.... I've just never considered it. I guess I've never had extra long spools of mono. When I decided that fishing on lighter gear was the way to go, I filled a spool up on my old aero baitrunner and then realised that 300 metres was going to drastically underfill the reel. So I packed it out with tape to bring it level with all the line on. I've just done it ever since. I think that it's worth swapping out though when a serious amount of 6lb and 10 pound presents itself.... as eventually happens..

I'm looking forward to that day. No small spools here. I tend to buy braid in 300m spools and then split the length between my paired rods. I wind on the line, then tape over the spools with masking tape until I'm up just past the rim, then I take the tape off by winding it around a dowel, unwind the line with the electric drill back onto the plastic spool it came on, pack out the reel's spool with the masking tape as firmly as I'm game and then put the line back onto it. If you've allowed half a mil for compression, it generally works out perfectly. We've been modifying our drag washers by sanding and polishing them with 1000 wet and dry and replacing the drag washers with oiled felt. I've still not done mini rig breaking tests to ascertain the safety factors with the gear I've aquired, so I'm just leaving the drag set at 1/3 the breaking strain of the nominated weakest link. I'm a big fan of 2lb pretest mono too. Anything you hook become rather interesting. I acquired some 1lb mono, but will wait until the neighbors restock their goldfish pond before I break that out.

How much line do you reckon you've got on your spools? I'm thinking that I might be coming up short on the middle sized rods if I've only got 150 metres of 10 lb on them and I tangle with something on the other side of decent.. Mind you, the knees shaking is why I love light line fishing.

Well, there is more than one reason to fish that creek. Canberra has a few advantages in that reasonable fishing is close to civilisation. It's purely coincidence that young fit ladies with a lycra fetish feel the need to demonstrate their firmness of body by parading it along the concrete catwalks that seem to bypass our fishing spots. We also get entertained at various venues by Dragon Boat teams, the aformentioned rowers, cyclists, skaters, joggers, dog walkers, skateboarders and occasionally wedding parties. My small binoculars only get used to check out the fashion sense of the bridesmaids and if the groomsmen have appropriately hemmed their trousers to break at the right point on the shoe. Spandex body wrap doesn't have these issues, so I tend to look at other details. We were tempted to make up some score cards to hold up in the hope of encouraging some competition, but it might look like we're there for something other than fishing.. We have decided that as pepperoni has been confirmed at a legitimate carp bait, we are going to introduce some of our colleagues to carp fishing. This will be done by way of taking them out, explaining our tactics, pointing out the advances made in carp fishing in the last 20 years, setting them up with baited rods, chairs, bottled fluid of mildly alcoholic content and culminating in having pizza delivered to a GPS location coinciding with ours. There may even be a small whiteboard presentation on the various rigs and the evolution of carp bait, which is where the pizza will come in. Until then, we'll continue to trawl the Internet for information and just keep going out to sit on the banks, hoping to test the integrity of our knots against fish that can't be lifted out of the water by the lines that pull them in. I've been lucky enough to fly fish for trout in Canada and the USA where I could share my swim with raccoons, gators, squirrels and hear the sound of beavers slapping the water in alarm and Elk or Moose roaring off in the distance. It's almost exactly the same in Canberra. I can see the flag of Parliament house fluttering in the distance, sit back and shut my eyes and listen. I can sometimes hear car alarms going off on the other side of the water and off in the distance, I can hear the roaring of the beanie-headed bogan, with his SS commodore hitting the rev limiter. Ah, Canberra. Home to swarms of scaley, fishy smelling, bottom feeding creatures of limited intelligence, that turned up by suspicious methods in places that nobody wants them, by methods that nobody is quite sure of. And they're generally despised by most Australians. But I guess every country has to have Politicians. At least we have reasonable carp fishing here.

Today was designated as a fishing day, so last night I went out to try the new spomb berley distribution device in an attempt to provide an enchanting environment for carp delectation. Light was fading as it does this time of year, but not before I got to witness the kind of splash that the spomb makes shortly before it does its underwater oyster vomit trick. It's more than the normal spod makes, but it's about twice as fat. I faffed a few lobs on purpose to see if I could make it fail to deliver it's load of tuna oil flavoured chicken pellets. Nope. Worked a treat every single time. The only thing you have to watch out for is that the hinge is at the end of the tail fin, so if there is anything on the flat parts that form half the fin near the hinge, it won't close properly. I found that a scoop from the local chinese cheap shop worked brilliantly and let me ladel in pellets in a heaped line to make the best use of the internal volume. In short order I had six kilos of burley distributed across our target area. Then we came back at 9am today to see if it had been worth the effort. Oh, while I think of it, when you actually get a spomb in your hand, it looks rather small. I thought that it wouldn't get as much as the bigger spod we had, so first up for the day was to fill the spomb with our two other spods to compare load bearing capacity. The small spod filled it to about the quarter of it's capacity. The larger spod didn't make half. It's quite deceptive. Much is made of carp's love of corn, so I figured that chucking out a load of creamed corn with the spomb would achieve a great test of it's disgorging capability and also give the taste and smell, but not a tummy full of corn to Monsieur Carp. And the Spomb handled it like a champ. I'm really impressed with this gadget. If you dripped honey and strawberry jam over Megan Fox, Jessica Alba and Scarlett Johansson, jammed them in and cast them into midstream, they'd get kicked out faster than Fred Nile at a Village People fan club. But onto the day's events. I had noticed that the Google Maps photos and Bing photos of our favourite part of the lake showed the same weed patterns even though they're significantly different in terms of time. They're totally different years and seasons. Because there are some landmarks easily visible, even though our casting spot is hidden by trees, we should be able to find where the optimum spot is in the weeds to put the hookbaits. I had printed out some of the aerial photos that showed points of reference and figured that if google maps were oriented North/South, I could just align the maps and take reversed compass headings off a few landmarks to get our casting point. Because I've measured the distances to a few things around the area with google maps, I could give a good idea of what line and distance we'd need to hit the right spot. So I set about with sighting compass, compensated to 12 degrees east declination and things didn't quite work out. Eventually we realised that there is more than one park bench that can be seen from the other side of the lake. Yet only one is visible in the picture. Eventually, my fishing buddy said that we should just ignore "North" as designated by google and measure the angle between two known points on our side, from a landmark on the other. So we did this instead. It got us between the two trees that we though we were between and we were able to identify a group of trees on the horizon that lined up exactly with the apex of the feature in the weeds that we wanted to target. Where I had thought this spot was, as I'd seen it in the photos, was about five metres to the right of where we'd burley'd, so I figured we'd target it next trip and see what happened this time. My fishing buddy had drawn that side and so elected to explore it somewhat. We were armed with 1st, 2nd and the new basic 50/50 mix boilies, along with various versions of the bread and cheese ball anointed with some concoction that I can't remember the name of, but it's supposedly a scientifically developed bit attracting chemical. Just in case, I bought some home brand corn. Carp don't appear to be tag hags when it comes to tinned corn. Besides, we had home brand creamed corn as appetiser. They might be be brand loyal. Nobody has tested this yet. And it was very quiet. Even the rats were having a day off. Everything went on as before. But not a peep out of the fish. We saw one jump half heartedly, like it had a hang over, but pretty much nothing. for the first couple of hours. Eventually, we were visited by some pigeons. That was rather unusual. I'm not a big pigeon fan, but I do think that when the day comes that they decide that all politicians will have statues carved, pigeons will have a dramatic rise in popularity as we will finally have a representative that will symbolically speak for us all. The pigeons strolled through our assortment of gear, limbo'd under the rods and decided that the open corn can was their personal invitation to dine on our tab. I decided that as the carp weren't biting, I should attempt to catch a pigeon instead. My fishing buddy looked sceptical. Little did he know, but I grew up in a house with an original copy of "Graves The Ten Bushcraft Books" The relevant chapter can be viewed here: http://chrismolloy.com/www/p139 There was a new rod in the car that hadn't been strung up before as I haven't got around to dividing up the 10lb braid, so I grabbed it and the spare 50lb spod braid. With a rod holder and a stick, the rod was in rough position. Four bits of carefully whittled, carved and notched stick later, I had a cleared spot with a 50lb orange braid noose on the ground. Once the sear piece was tied into the string and the trigger rod set up, the noose was laid out over the trigger rod. The braid was pulled down to tension up the rod as a spring and a loop wrapped over the empty spool and held with the bail arm. Carp bait corn fuelled the trap and we had a laugh as the pigeons had long since departed. While this had gone on, we were starting to get finicky bites. Not being sure if it was line bites, we persisted with the cheese and bread balls. Eventually, I tired of this and figured that maybe we had a lot of small carp taking tentative nibbles on something that they couldn't get in their gobs. So I stripped off the bread blob and instead of using the hair, just put the corn on the hook old style. Within ten minutes we had the first carp banked. Bingo. A tiddler of barely 1 kg. We changed everything over to corn and set back to see what happened. What did was an increase in stronger bites. And then, the pigeons came back. Hilariously, they regarded the trap with suspicion. Even bright orange string in a ring with snacks in the middle says something is up, to a bird. They stood with their feet just outside the braid and pecked at what they could get to. Being that there were two of them, with a third onlooker, maybe they felt that being cautious was eventually less of a concern. They soon cleaned up what was available within beak radius of the string edge and then the one closest to the trigger rod stepped reluctantly into the circle. It pecked at the pile of corn in the middle, just to the side of the trigger rod. It bumped it. But not enough. We giggled like schoolgirls. about twenty seconds later, it bumped it just enough again. This time, it sprung the trap. What I didn't bother to do was to make sure that the rod tip would move enough before it straightened up, to close the noose completely from any point within the circle. Luckily though, the fall guy pigeon was at the furthest end of the trigger rod and the noose of braid neatly closed just enough. We laughed because we initially thought we'd missed. Neither of the pigeons had moved although the trap had successfully sprung. Then I got up to see what had happened and the pigeons took to the air. One got all of about two feet away. Our second catch of the day! Pigeons are too hard to weigh and the line weight / animal weight ratio was more than 100:1 in the wrong direction. The bird also didn't seem too keen on being tossed back into the water and managed to avoid it, disappearing with its wingmen to parts unknown. I doubt it will raid the corn again. The corn started to produce and as it was getting gently hit, we had to go back to bait checks at regular intervals. I found a 2 kilo plus carp during a bait check. Stealthy [censored].... Eventually I got to a total of three carp and one pigeon when my companion finally hooked up his first fish with our first ever screaming run. It was on a bread and cheese ball. A standard carp of just over 4 kilos. Corn and bread is still beating boilies so far, but I'm sure that the tide will turn as the feeding gets more active. Regardless, we've got better tactics and technique now. We're recording what we're doing and what we're catching. It's slowly coming together and there is one special project that's on the way. Similar things have been done before, but not in this country and not like I have planned if everything works. We might have something to show you guys in a few months.

Prices for fishing and rod licenses don't exist here. You will need to pay in a commercial fishery, but they're few and far between. Carp ones don't exist at all. You'll need a license to fish in NSW. In fact, everywhere in Aus except the ACT requires one. 3 Days - $6.00 1 Month - $12.00 1 Year - $30.00 3 Years - $75.00 You can apply online https://www.licence.nsw.gov.au/gls_eservice/renewals/Application.aspx Here's what you should read for NSW in terms of regulations: It should get you started. http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/fisheries/recreational/regulations

When these fish are being tagged, are they being measured and weighed as well? It would be interesting to see what sort of fish these conditions are producing. I'm sure that the growth/weight charts might start looking odd towards the top end with short fatties like steve's first one showing up. That's more like 5 kilo length. And is there a running total on how often each number is caught? Nice work by the volunteers, too.

Nice work! I'll be waiting for the footage on youtube!

Oddly enough, the GDE has sped things up incredibly when it's not peak hour.. When it's four lanes all the way (one day) it will be awesome! The 26th was full moon and just for the hell of it, we went out again to see if there was any appreciable change. I was trying cheese and bread balls on two lines in the burleyed area and a curry boilie concoction on another in a seperate area. Things were pretty dead, but for the first time three water rats decided to keep us company. Normally they're pretty entertaining to watch and feed with various bits of bait but three of them together must have been enough for them to decide to put on a floor show. The slapstick three stooges routine of chasing each other around and falling into the water morphed into some synchronised swimming. That was fine, except that they appeared to cotton on to the fact that they could attempt to play tunes by strumming the strings of the odd flashing musical instruments on shore. Maybe someone told them that flashing lights can induce siezures. They sure had a good go at Beethoven's fifth on the four stringed carp harp that we had apparently set up for their musical endeavours. Well, our bite detectors are of different brands. Eventually we figured that putting food out for them on the burrow side of the lines was the smarter option. The rats snax takeaway pile was repositioned and replenished on the other side of the lines and the encore performances lost their allure. There was a bit of activity on the bite detectors that wasn't attributable to ratmaninov 6lb braid concerto no2 attempts and they now became discernable from the background noise. It was too regular to be line bites, so eventually I struck one out of frustration and hooked a tiny carp. Checking it's mouth size against our baits, it was pretty obvious that this was what was happening. It was trying to gum the bread marble to death. Eventually, I got sick of nothing happening and broke out the trusty zoom focus torch to see if I could see anything on the other side of the inlet. In the murky water, I made out some 70 centimeter plus carp, hovering in about two feet. They always look white in reflected light. Within a distance of twenty metres I counted another thirteen. All almost hovering or swimming very slowly. Definately less active than a normal summers day. (Which is to be expected.) Lining up the marks that we cast against, let me guestimate the areas of depth. More marker float work required there. I went back and sent my companion out to have a look for the carp, but he couldn't see anything. After we packed up at 9, I suggested that we both go and have a look again so that I could point them out and train his eye. There seemed to be even more in the same areas. Wandering further along, I could see a white shopping bag poking out of the water, so that gives you an idea of the depth. We were amazed to see eight carp of 3 kilo and above investigating it with great interest. There was an empty cup and something else inside. One was sucking at the plastic in an attempt to get whatever was inside. It was rather interesting. Keeping in mind some of the observations of the time scales of carp returning to their interest, we watched for a while and then I lobbed a squashball sized rock into the bag. The carp naffed off, of course, but stayed in a rough half circle in the deeper water about two metres away from the bag. So whatever was in there was interesting them. Even as we watched they were moving slowly back to the bag. Maybe it was competition because of the number there. Maybe something really nice to carp was leaking from the bag. In terms of observation, it was interesting, but I wouldn't gain any general thoughts of behaviour without many more detailed ones. What was in the bag other than a plastic coffee cup? Who knows? But it is Canberra, so if a prostitute turns up somewhere missing a head, I'm going to anonymously email the google map coordinates to the police.

That's three very impressive scores! 1. Your line to fish weight ratio is over 1:4 2. It's a big mirror 3. You got a girl to come fishing with you and she touched a fish and posed for a photo!

Actually no. But thanks for the lead! There are quite a few passionate fishermen at DFF. (I wonder if there are some passionate foresters?) A few years ago, I said literally one wrong word about where some info had come from, to the wrong person at a backyard barbeque on a Sunday. On Monday morning, an entire business unit in a Government Department had interviews with their Assistant Secretary to see who had been giving out their opinions. Handily enough, it was a comedy of errors situation and I found out about it third hand over twelve months later and put two and two together. But knowing that these kinds of things happen, makes me never divulge names. Protecting sources of information means that you can go back later and ask more questions. We're in the information age. Sometimes Information can be traded for alcohol.

Well, I've been looking at carp in a new light since there is an overwhelming love of them in different countries. I'm wondering just how much of the animosity to carp in Australia is misplaced. Some of the naturalist fishermen that I respect, I'm now asking their opinions about it all and it is proving educational. There are a few fishermen in the Department of Forestry and Fisheries that I'm talking to that don't share the standard Australian opinions and there are some environmental conservation companies that my ex girlfriend used to work for that have done some surveys in this sort of thing. They might not be interested in talking about their data as it's been paid for by companies that legally have to do this sort of investigation due to the legislation in Australia, but it's possible that they will offer some supporting evidence that mitigates calls for their destruction to the general population. But as such, if you feel the need to withhold your knowledge, that's your choice.

Are you a vegetarian?

Being not quite the full moon, but close enough to it, my standard carping companion and I hit the lake today to see what having something like a plan would do for our success rates. Upon arrival we spooled up the feature finding rod with some yellow braid and then spent some time trying to figure out why the lake appeared significantly shallower than I knew it to be. Other than the realisation that it was the wrong fifty percent of the chances of rigging a float and sinker correctly, we then had to try and overcome the tendency of the jury rigged sinker of twisting the braid. Once that was overcome by letting it sit down onto the float swivel, things went a little more smoothly. By absolute luck, my fishing buddy had bought the 10 foot general purpose rod from Kmart that I thought might work well as a cheap spodding rod. With some very thin 50lb braid on it and the marker float showing a break in the weeds, a few test casts saw the line clipped and we proceeded to pepper one particular area almost exactly two metres to the right of the marker float with tuna oil flavoured laying pellets. Once the correct technique for stopping the spod gently was perfected, splashdown stayed within a reasonable area. Despite my best efforts, even aiming off provided little difference to where the spod deposited carp snacks. We figured that it was just a reference point and so managed to cast the Mk 1 and 2 boilie into the target areas with little problem But for four hours.... nothing. Then the kneaded cheese recipe was dusted off. 1/4 of a slice of processed individually wrapped cheese kneaded through 3 crustless white bread slices. With some exercise which is sure to develop forearms like popeye, we soon had some boilie sized chunks in our cheesy smelling hands. The first cast proved that a boilie stop wouldn't work so much as retard the little dough ball slightly on it's way to choke a seagull on the bank on the other side. A quick look around proved that the common everyday garden variety small bit of stick worked superbly to keep the ball on the hair rig. So we switched to this bait and within half an hour, had a specimen reaching not quite 5 kg in the net. I managed to have two hook links let go on me, unravelling through the swivels on both rods. Much to my astonishment. One fish we almost had in sight before it turned and just accelerated away like a Monster truck towing Kylie Minogue through a six inch pool of rice pudding. All on bread. Eventually I banked a little fellow that fought far over his weight limit of just over 2kg and then found a big silvery shimmer grazing contentedly in the torch light.... with no rod, of course. It wasn't a bad day out. Might do it again tomorrow. We did discover that taking a compass heading on the marker float can be quite a good idea.....

Nails, the SPOMB people reckon that they've never sold a spomb directly from their website to Australia. There is one that they gave to a friend in Adelaide and yours is via ebay, so you possibly have one of only two in Oz. (Depending if anyone else got one from their many outlets of course) The ability to dump almost any consistancy at range really appeals to me as I was keen to distribute some small particulate in the water so as to put the suggestion of food out there, without giving anything substantial to eat. It's also not going to require so much of a fast crank back either.

That's the problem with so many options on what to put in bait. The list of additives and flavours is huge, so it's hard to know if you should expect almost anything to work to a certain degree, or if you could test one particular additive above all others. I sat there looking at the spices and herbs in Woolworths not four days ago wondering the exact same thing. There are so many additives that don't seem to get any press. Why can't we just attach a laminated menu and wax pencil to a sinker and take orders? In the end I just made curry boilies with aniseed and vanilla. And that's because I couldn't find powdered garlic.

Aha, well you've failed to mask out all the water! So we know for a fact that it was near some! I've got the drop, chaps. Don't bother looking for Ben's secret spot anywhere where there isn't water. That will narrow it down somewhat..

Yes. I caught a small 4 pounder in Lake B-G about two months ago, much to the amazement of a guy from QLD who'd happened to be camped right next to our spot. None of us had ever seen one in the flesh before and I couldn't remember what they were called. So it was a good night all round..

Being a full carbon rod would be a bonus.

And some people know Jack and find others intimidating, but I do actually know Karl. And we don't always agree either. That spomb looks rather interesting. I've been entertaining the thoughts of those Pelagic reels, but I bought a little Melaluka to see what they're like and so now am looking at the SW70B. http://cgi.ebay.com.au/New-Melaluka-SW70-9BB-Deluxe-Xtra-Lrg-Bait-Feeder-Reel_W0QQitemZ400136174550QQcategoryZ36164QQcmdZViewItemQQ_trksidZp4340.m263QQ_trkparmsZalgo%3DDLSL%252BPSSI%252BSI%26its%3DI%26itu%3DUCI%252BUA%252BUCK%26otn%3D10%26pmod%3D120595395540%252B120595395540%26po%3D%26ps%3D63 It has a slightly bigger brother in the SW80, but the 70 has the shallower lip on the spool. The ridiculous grabs my attention, particularly with the drag mechanism and spare spool included. I've seen a few pictures of these around and finally this one turned up today. http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370405385701&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT It looks like it would soak up 200 metres of 40lb braid with few issues at all...