Pear Shaped Week

Well this weeks carp fishing trip pretty much went pear shaped from the start. With my diary now bang up to date I had a week off work to go fishing and hopefully catch a few decent carp. I considered a trip to the carp societies horseshoe lake with linear fisheries as a backup plan if anything went wrong. The trouble is something did go wrong and it wrecked my plans for horseshoe and linear, the alternator went on my car resulting in a loss of power steering. There was nothing I could do, I put the car in Monday morning and got it back late on Tuesday, too late to go fishing. That was the best and quietest two days fishing down the pan, going to horseshoe lake or linear fisheries from midweek onwards I consider to be a complete waste of time so I had to look closer to home for the rest of the week. The easiest thing to do was to head back to the Cheshire carp lake I’ve been fishing the odd session on recently, it wasn’t exactly where I wanted to go with a week off but under the circumstances there wasn’t a lot left and I had little choice but to keep with the north west carp, this mean’t there would be no more carp trips down south for this year. Rather than do a night on the Cheshire carp lake I opted for a day session instead, being mid-week I thought I’d be sure to get a good choice of peg. On the way to the lake I paid a quick visit to gp pellets in middlewich, I’d been there a week or two ago to pick up a bucket of mixed trout pellets and found they were closed, at least I had better luck this time and I bought myself one of their 8 kilo buckets of mixed trout pellets for £10, considering you get a nice plastic bucket with a sealable lid I’d say that’s a fair price and definitely better than the price the tackle shops are charging!. I also paid a quick visit to daves of middlewich for a new spool of Kryston Silkworm, I had a look at the price of the trout pellets whilst I was there and wondered why anyone would be stupid enough to buy them!. Having successfully avoided one of the teenage shop assistants trying to impress me with his word for word recital of the latest carp world magazine I headed off to the lake for the rest of the day. On arrival at the lake I couldn’t see anyone fishing. I stood at one end of the lake looking across at the tree line spot I’d fished for the last few sessions, I looked up the lake into the out of bounds area too, I sort of knew where I wanted to fish and I was just about to head back to the car for my fishing gear when a guy appeared from nowhere in the swim I wanted. I watched him for a minute and he bent down as if adjusting his rods, I strained my eyes and tried to focus and I’m sure I could make out a Rod Pod with rods sitting on it. Sure enough he was back minutes later with a marker rod, I was gutted, one angler on the whole lake and he turns out to be a carp angler in the very swim I wanted to fish!. I looked a bit closer and discovered he was actually bivvied up, he’d just set his bivvy well back from the waters edge and I hadn’t seen it because he was set well back in the trees. I had no choice but to fish the tree line peg, the water here is fairly shallow and I wasn’t happy with my choice of swim for this session, with no carp rolling or showing I had little choice but to pick a swim then watch closely and move if necessary. This was the course of action I took and despite the water being well stocked I didn’t see a single carp crash or roll all day. My tree line swim looks like it’s dried up too, no carp where seen here either and no action came my way. I packed up at 7.30pm and trudged off home a little bit despondent, my week off had gone from wanting to chase those big southern carp to blanking for our smaller north west carp on a water I could fish every week, not exactly what I envisaged when I finished work for my holiday last Friday!. With one blank half day session to show for my week off I sat and pondered what I was going to do next, things had gone so wrong I actually felt like saving the rest of my holidays and going back to work!. Unfortunately that was out of the question and I found myself with little motivation to get the rods out for the rest of the week. I did return to my swim on the river dee for a few hours one morning but it had rained heavily the previous day and I found the river a good 12 inches up and flowing so fast I could barely hold bottom with a 3oz lead weight. I didn’t see any sign of a carp during my short session either and needless to say I blanked. I regard the next five to six weeks as a tough time for any north west carp angler, autumn is here and it won’t be long before we start seeing some frost, I’m sure some big carp will be caught from the Cheshire area over the next month and I’m currently considering my own options. I have the choice to stick with the Cheshire carp lake I’ve started fishing, keep with the river dee carp and see if I can get amongst some bigger carp or return to one of Cheshire’s big carp waters, fish through the blanks and hope to be rewarded with a big fish. Each has it’s own attractions, the Cheshire carp lake means a good chance of action for medium sized carp, the river dee carp are all unknown and one of Cheshire’s big carp lakes could well bring a new pb but may well result in me catching nothing at all between now and early November. I haven’t decided what to do yet but whatever I decide, you can read about it next week!. Tight Lines
Mark