Doing Your Own Thing VS Taking Advice
Julian weighs up taking advantage of often well-known and regularly baited spots, compared to doing your own thing by looking for an alternative and possibly better feature...
Being quite honest, I like to do things on my own terms, but I tell you what, if I turn up on a new water and get advice from a local on how, where, when etc., and then catch one immediately, it would not diminish my feeling of accomplishment one iota. In fact, “Thank you very much my friend,” and good angling Jules, for being liked enough for people to help me and not having an ego that says that I know best and need to do it on my own. Bugger that. If it helps me, I’m on it straight away.
Being less flippant, I think it’s all an age and experience thing, and the older and wiser you get, the more you can weigh up advice and decide whether it’s worth following or common sense tells you otherwise. If I turn up at a new water and someone whom I trust is catching gives me up-to-date advice which my own common sense or observations on the day don’t contradict with, then that will be my starting point, and I mean my starting point only. Carp fishing is about putting the pieces together and it’s no crazier than finding out when and where your target fish gets caught, the cycle of the moon, the nature of the lakebed or what people have seen show that day. None of that, or details of the casting spots would be anything I’d bet the house on, but as part of the puzzle, I am not going to ignore it, nor though, will I be bound by it.
When I fished Drax in the late eighties, I was told that they only got caught in the edge; that I needed to use an HNV bait; that the smaller the hook, the more bites I’d get; and that a dozen carp a year was good… and all this from a credible source! A week of visiting the venue in advance revealed carp everywhere but in the margins, and head-and-shouldering at fifty to seventy yards between thick weedbeds. No way was I going to use small hooks out there! And they were big old fish that needed grub too. A week of baiting heavily with Enervite and going in with big hooks produced more carp for me in two trips than the top rod had all year! Yes, advice beforehand is always gratefully received, but when it contradicts thirty-five years’ experience and what my eyes are telling me, I will do my own thing.
Talking about doing my own thing, I have to say that although I’m a bit of a traditionalist at times, I do embrace new technology and ideas, as long as they sit comfortably with me. Frankly, I couldn’t care less how others fish, as long as it does not impact on my fishing, or bring fishing into disrepute. I have used bait boats, but have no intention of doing so now, or Deepers or drones at the moment, but never say never, eh!
What I have embraced is the baiting pole tactic, something I started playing with in the late eighties in the winter when I was fishing Three Lakes. The carp would hold up in Dead Tree Bay through the colder months, and the trick was to cast it across the bay and onto the far bank spit. You’d then get your mate to look after the rod and then you ran round to where the lead had dropped. I always cast it myself so I could legitimately say I had cast and landed the carp. I’d then add the hooklength and place it in a baiting spoon I’d Gaffer-taped to two extending landing net poles which gave me all of sixteen feet of reach. The spoon with the rig—a pop-up off the lead—together with the chopped-up boilies soaked in Kryston Ambio, would be pushed out from the bank and deposited in a clear patch in the weed. All three rods would be done that way, and left in position for up to forty-eight hours, or until one went—as they often did. For two winters in a row, I did really well with this tactic, and here I am well over thirty years later doing the same, but this time from the swim and pushing it into the reeds, and with equally good results.
