Carping Allegedly - August 23'

Magazine covers
I sincerely hope I am wrong, but I suspect the next ten years will see the virtual end of angling magazines and print, our thirst for all things carpy then being satisfied solely by YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and whatever other new forms of social media are inflicted on us in the meantime. I am certainly not opposed to reading and broadening my horizons via social media, and indeed, I waste many an hour doing so, but I still prefer the printed word. Firstly, I love the smell and feel of a new magazine. Secondly, I don’t get a headache if I spend too long reading them!

I also love the impact of a strong front cover on a magazine. I tend to remember specific publications as much by the image adorning their cover as I do the content within. The iconic shot of the sartorially elegant Rod Hutchinson on the banks of Saint-Cassien on the front of the first-ever Carpworld, and photos of Mike Wilson and Jim Clavin who featured on the cover of the Carp Society’s first two Carp Fisher magazines—to name but three—are permanently etched in my memory banks. Yet you ask me to name specific articles which those publications included and I would be at a loss.

Before I move on from the impact and importance of front covers, I must mention those of CARPology 235 and 236. These featured Adam Penning and Mike Willmott, respectively, and I thought they were terrific. Both were strong images of superb fish. They had great vibrancy and unquestionably they were equally carpy. On a number of occasions in the past I have mentioned that smiling for fish pictures is not carpy, and under normal circumstances I would feel obliged to take Penners to task for his jubilant facial expression, but given the quality of the fish in question and the hard work that went into catching it, I guess he can be forgiven.

Belt and Braces
I happily use bait screws and have never had a problem losing pop-ups from them, although, in fairness, I always use hardened, glycerol-soaked hookbaits, which are much less likely to soften and swell. I also never use them if I find myself in a situation where I am planning to leave baits in position for more than twenty-four hours or so.

The new One More Cast (OMC) Eyed Bait Screws remove any paranoia I may have had about leaving baits out for prolonged periods, in that a hole through the screw thread allows you to include floss, and/or a bait stop and floss, and then blob it with a lighter in the usual way. Obviously the addition of the floss eliminates any concerns about birds pecking the bait off or carp picking it up and not getting the hook, which would leave you with a bare hook sitting out there. You can also change from a single to a double hookbait with ease.

OMC Eyed Bait Screws are available in two sizes. They come in packs of 5 and include a micro ring swivel. This all makes them ideal for numerous presentations.

I hear the handful of dissenting social media voices, of course, who claim that, rather than investing five of your earth pounds down at the tackle shop, you can achieve the self-same thing with just an ickle ring swivel and a length of floss. That’s quite possibly true, but surely the same can be said of any rig that incorporates a standard bait screw, and that certainly hasn’t stopped many of us using them to good effect. In my humble opinion, they’re brilliant, and without a doubt, they’re a great investment for a mere Lady Godiva!

Mirror Pool… at Last!
It took me the best part of ten years to bank my first carp from Mirror Pool. I say that not because I found its inhabitants so incredibly difficult to catch, but because the venue was on my radar for almost a decade before I actually got around to wetting a line there.

Back in the winter of 2002, Colin McNeil and I were plotting and planning an assault on a water that would hopefully give us a realistic chance of banking a fish in excess of fifty pounds, and Mirror Pool and The Graviers were the two venues at the very top of our list. 

My ongoing reluctance to make initial contact with fishery owners—for fear they may think that I am looking for preferential treatment—meant that Col got himself the job for both venues. We were looking to secure a couple of weeks the following summer, and although at that time we didn’t particularly have a preference for either water, the fact that our initial call put us in contact with a very enthusiastic and welcoming Luke Moffatt meant that The Graviers ended up as our venue of choice for the following few years. Mirror Pool would have to wait for another day.

My first sight of ‘Mirror’ eventually came in June of 2012. Col and I had pulled off Meadow Lake a day early and booked in at a nearby hotel so we could watch England miraculously manage to beat Sweden 3–2 in the European Championship, and having first okayed it with Wayne, who bailiffed and looked after both fisheries, we dropped in before kick-off for a quick look around.

Not wanting to intrude too much on the party whose week was coming to an end, we restricted our all-too-brief first visit to a swift wander along the dam wall—which gave us a view right up the lake to the shallows—and a stroll round to the much-talked-about Boathouse swim. The Boathouse was occupied by a very accommodating fella. He had obviously spent quite a bit of time on the water over the years and appeared to have things pretty much sorted in terms of the tactics required to temp the occasional Mirror Pool fish.

What he told us confirmed just about everything we had heard about the water, in that it did indeed appear that the vast majority of the fish caught from the lake came to tiny patches of baits fished right up under the trees on the far bank, on a very narrow gravel shelf. It wasn’t exactly what we wanted to hear, but judging by the angle of our new-found friend’s lines, he certainly seemed pretty happy to have all his eggs in that one particular basket.

My preference has always been for open-water fishing, if it’s at all possible, although I am happy to fish on marginal shelves, if needs must. I always find the tactic to be great leveller, and more to the point, it is not something I have ever been especially good at. Open-water fishing is undoubtedly what I am best at, and it gives me the opportunity to work to my strengths, namely, the steadily applying a foodbait over a number of days. The big problem with practically all the open-water areas on Mirror Pool, though, is that not only are they excessively deep, but due to the age of the place, they are abnormally silty, and on the face of it, not particularly welcoming.

Having said all that, and having taken on board everything matey in the Boathouse had told us, Col and I drove back up through France and into the UK the following day, busily convincing ourselves that there was no way that the big fish that swam in Mirror—including a good seventy and another certainly capable of topping seventy pounds at the right time of year—were prepared to pick up baits only on a shelf… they simply had to feed in the open water as well!

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about scenarios like this, and I always end up thinking that if we are right and there are indeed lakes where fish will entertain baits only on very specific, tiny spots, surely every freebie that gets slightly mis-catapulted or dropped a marginally out of place would forever be ignored and left to either decompose on the lakebed or float to the surface.