Relive Issue 1! CARPology's 100 Greatest Moments

Footnote: This article was originally featured in issue 100 of CARPology (August 2012), and is being rerun as part of our 200 issues celebrations.

In issue 100 we wrote: 'In the last century of issues, CARPology has done many things, from mocking up Terry Hearn in court to appearing in loaded magazine. So here for you now, are what we reckon are our very best bits from the last 100 editions...'

100 THE GOLDEN TICKET
On paper it was a genius idea: find one of the ten golden tickets which were placed at random inside issue 26 and you’d be entered into an amazing competition. Unfortunately only seven were found...

99 BACK TO FRONT
Or not such a great moment… We produced a media pack to show potential advertisers what CARPology was going to be. However, when we got it back they’d bound half of it upside down.

98 TEL TEXTING US
‘Oi, oi! The mag’s the bollox m8; love it.’ That was one of many text messages we received from the legend that is our cover star this month: Terry Hearn.

97 THE BEST COVER
Although it now looks frighteningly out of date, issue 13, our first edition to go on-sale in WHSmith and other newsagents, saw us almost triple our monthly sales overnight. Cheers, Tel!

96 BRITAIN’S BEST SWIM
Publishing a monthly title has some nice perks – and in the spring of 2010 Rob got one of the said perks: to fish from one of the penthouses on Bradley’s Lake in the Cotswolds – a cool £500,000 house.

95 ROB BUYING KARL’S HOUSE
Bizarrely this is how Joe and Rob met their third shareholder in Toffee Publications Ltd. (the publisher of CARPology and Maximum Carp), Karl. Karl’s good with money (i.e. very tight and sensible) and at the time Rob and Joe were terrible and they needed an investor - the partnership worked.

94 FISHING FOR A RECORD
In the summer of 2005 we got to fish Luke Moffatt’s incredible Graviers in France. It was an amazing: Luke is a gentleman; the fish are huge and the buzz of the place was amazing. And of course all blanked apart from Jay who had a 60lber on day three. The editor won the ‘sprat match though!’

93 BEST SELLER
Unfortunately sales aren’t dictated by how good your product is but how deep pockets are for the best distribution and rarely a cover/cover star makes any difference. This was proved on issue 75, our bestseller and Rob was on the front! He lays claim it was his good looks and stunning carp. We say it was thanks to the £5.00 cover mount and promotional hotspot with WHSmith…

92 GALLERY PANEL
Or to be more precise, the self-photography panel we started up in ‘Dear CARPology…’ (i.e. the letters page) after seeing Regan’s attempts at do-your-own-photographs. The results were outstanding. There were many stand-out entries, but the highlight does have to be this one from our longest standing contributor, Pete Regan - a legend!

91 READERS POSTING
That leads on nicely to all you lovely people who have posed all around the world with something CARPology related: hoodies, Tees, magazines or as Daniel Wills did, covered his car and the front windows of his house in huge CARPology stickers.

90 CHILLY’S ECHO POSTER
To go hand-in-hand with Chilly’s article on ECHO which appeared in issue 1, we wanted to create an advert for ECHO but to be different from anything they’d had before. This is what CARPology’s creative genius, John came up with… awesome, eh? We’ll have to rerun it again in future issues. 

89 HOODIE MAYHEM
We’ll come to garment statistics shortly, but a personal highlight for Karl was his daughter telling him she served four customers wearing CARPology clothing in one shift at her local supermarket. We’ve seen them all over the world, too, from Canada to Russia to Northern Ireland and Sutton Coldfield.

88 THE CLIFF TEST: OUR USP - AND IT WORKED...
To launch a magazine into an already congested marketplace we needed to be different and what better way to kick things off than by lobbing a rod pod (Carp Tech’s Spider Pod) off a cliff to see if it could handle it. It survived!

87 CATCHING OUR COVER SHOT JUST BEFORE DEADLINE
You couldn’t have written it better if you tried. Struggling to find a good cover shot for issue 5 and then one of John’s rod rips off (the river’s in his back garden). How good is his Nadia from Big Brother pout?!

86 MAXIMUM CARP CLOTHING ON TOUR
More garment-related highlights from the last eight years, this time for our new sister title, Maximum Carp, and once again it was Karl who bumped into someone whilst on holiday in Turkey wearing a Maximum Carp T-Shirt.

85 ‘IT WAS LIKE BEING A CELEB’
The editor, 2007, 10.32pm in Norwich at the Riverside near the train station, in a slightly refreshed state when one bloke shouts, “It’s him, it’s him! It’s Joe Wright!” A group of around 15 guys then grab him, all shouting at the same time, “You’re awesome, you’re coming out with us!”

84 CAPTURING THE MOMENT
That’s what we love about you CARPologists – it’s your level of dedication to this printed piece of tree. It’s amazing. Moments after your wife has just given birth to your newly born son, Justin, there’s you, holding him up to the camera phone with a CARPology hoodie in shot and a copy of the latest issue tucked under your arm. You’re all bloody legends!

83 INSPIRATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS
There’s something about a picture that can capture your imagination. It can inspire; it can shock; and over the years we’ve featured many from a flooded bivvy with two carp swimming inside to a hooked carp trying to use our diver as a snag.

82 TEAM BONDING
World Cup 2010 – England vs. Germany – we had our own football match with BBQ in Rob’s garden. Putting aside the fact England lost, we discovered Karl’s amazing in goal. Seriously, he’s now known as ‘The Cat’.

81 F1 DRIVERS
Les Wright is a long-term reader of the magazine. He’s a legend. He also works in the wonderful world of F1 and has sent us many a snap of a F1 driver posing with the latest issue of CARPology.

80 HOT POTATO 
Over the years we’ve inundated you with requests: letters, catch shots, even set-up snaps, but none have provoked such a response as to when we wanted your piccies of fish flipping. Entertainment-wise, it’s been brilliant, so cheers!

79 MEGA SUBBY DEALS
These were great for us both: you got fistfuls of free stuff whilst we turned our already large subscription base into an enormous one. A

78 BAIT ROLLING CHAMPIONS
When Mick Barnes (of Gardner fame back then) asked if Joe and Rob would take part in a “friendly” bait rolling competition, never did we imagine we’d actually win, let allow become ‘World Bait Rolling Champions’ - a title we believe we still hold today. Kent Particles? Bait&Feed? Pah!

77 JOHN HANNENT BACK IN ‘OLOGY
He returned in issue 97 for the first time in seven years and we love him simply for his quotes such as, “I’ve come up with better names for carp, for example: ‘Your Missus’, ‘Young Choir Boy’ and ‘The Clap.’ Yeah, I had Your Missus last night and The Clap first thing this morning!”

76 MANY ‘FIRSTS’ FOR US...
Although other editors have now grabbed some of them (along with plenty of other ideas - Below The Surface, etc.), we can proudly say we were the first carp magazine to publish articles from the likes of Jon McAllister, Pete Regan and Wendy Lythgoe (remember her?).

75 THE AWESOME JON MAC RIG
A fine example of the power of print: we run our first feature with Jon McAllister in issue 30 (his first ever magazine piece) where he showed us the Multi Rig – a set-up devised by Mike Kavanagh in the early 90’s. We called it ‘The Jon Mac Rig’ and it’s been called that ever since.

74 DUNKING DAIWA
We’ll let Daiwa’s Marketing Manager, Stephen McCaveny explain this one… “When CARPology hit the shops we immediately liked what we saw. The look, the content and importantly the attitude. When I say attitude, I think one groundbreaking feature says it all: it was a tackle test. They tied a rope to a Tournament Entoh and threw it into a pond for six months! Eventually it went back to Daiwa HQ for a renovation and for no more than a tenner it was fixed. Now that’s not the end of it. The young, keen editor then decided to throw the now fixed reel into a freezer! Every month it came out and once at room temperature it was boiled… yes, boiled! Six months of this torture continued and by this time all of us at Daiwa were getting a bit twitchy that it would be probably be beyond repair. The now pale looking and rather melted Entoh travelled north again and thankfully was fixed for twenty quid. Genuine! Now that’s journalism.”

73 A CAMO COVER
We’re not sure if we’re the only magazine to ever have a full Realtree Hardwood’s camo cover, but the chances are you’ll never have seen it anyway. It was for our media pack – the one that got printed upside down in point 99 - which we put together so the advertisers could get a taste and feel for what CARPology was going to be. We never dared do it on a proper issue.

72 FISHING RELATED ACCIDENTS
Hook in the nose, baiting needle up the arse, huge mozzi bites, severed finger thanks to opening that dodgy can of corn with a pen-knife… we’ve seen the lot all thanks to you snapping the moment before calling the ambulance.

71 FRANCECARP 
Back in April 2005, FranceCarp was a newly formed holiday company with a lake called Etang Du Soleil. On that first trip we caught two thirties to 39lb. The second year, editor Joe and designer Dan experienced fishing like never before, however, it was this April, seven years on, that the lake showed its real potential when the editor caught nine 30’s, five 40’s and two 50’s to 59lb!

70 CARP RUNS – BOTH TRIPS
The first one was in 2006, the second in 2009 and both were brilliant. Not only are both the lakes in stunning regions in France, but the fishing was outstanding, particularly the second trip where the editor took four twenties, three thirties and a forty on the very first night of turning up. We’ll be back!

69 GOING TO JRC NO.1
Our first real ‘perk’ of starting ‘Ology: getting an invite to ‘test’ fish La Fritterie (formerly JRC 1). The fishing was mind-blowing, and we said so in the feature we ran in issue 6, and they sold two-thirds of their space within a week. And once again, behold the power of the printed word.

68 NIGEL AT REDMIRE POOL
Going to Redmire Pool is a huge treat in itself, but with Nigel Sharp? Epic. And that’s what happened to our editor in the August of 2007. And the pair rinsed it too, Nige having 18 bites whilst the editor had eight. And for the next three weeks the ‘mere only produced a handful of fish.

67 NASHY’S LAKE
What a trip this turned out to be... We had 48hrs on this incredible lake back in 2010 and although the editor managed a low-thirty, it was Rob who excelled, take five fish, including The Power Station at 40lb.

66 YOUTUBE
Behind-the-scenes we’re working tirelessly on various new medias (it’ll be revealed in October), and one key area is YouTube. Now whilst our new material is professionally presented, filmed and edited, it didn’t always used to be that way…

65 BATMAN AND ROBIN
Now whilst we’d rather forget this ever happened, seeing as we’ve just mocked Karl with his presenting skills, it only seems right to mention Joe and Rob’s cameo of Batman and Robin in Pete Castle’s An Interactive Guide To Carp Fishing.

64 UNDERWATER COVER
Never ones to play by the rulebook, we decided to try something different on the July cover of issue 64 and purchased this truly amazing underwater shot of a carp and diver – tying in perfectly with our Below The Surface headline.

63 KEY INTROS
These were the work of the creative genius that is John Hannent. These stupendous carp-imageries set the tone of the early editions, with the Saint Damo and Lee Jackson’s egghead being firm favourites of everyone in the office.

62 TEL IN COURT 
To get the maximum effect from our ‘Terry Hearn In Court’ headline which appeared on the cover of issue 13, we needed to do something clever: we superimposed Terry into a courtroom. It cleverly (and worryingly) worked, as readers kept asking, “how did you get Terry into that suit?”

61 SHAUN HARRISON’S ARTICLES
In the early spring of this year, our editor, in his infinite wisdom, decided he wanted to go all ‘home and country, outdoor, scrapbook’ and the perfect article to kick this off was Shaun Harrison’s new Mish-Mash series. To carry out this properly-done scrapbook style design involves four people. Shaun to write the article; the editor to do a rough layout of how he wants it to look and then the designer does the first style sheets. This is then sent to our talented illustrator, who draws in where we’ve left gaps. The picture captions are then handwritten on tracing paper, scanned and placed on the page. And you thought it was easy...

60 HARDWARE SPECIAL
It’s an annual tradition we started back in issue 56 (2008). It’s a 14-page, 10,000 words, whole host of photos and prototype illustrations and general nightmare-to-put-together feature, but it gives you an insight into what you can expect over the next 12-months.

59 EARLY UNDERWATER
Although we didn’t have any budget to throw at features in the early years, we did still had the foresight to come up with the ideas. Our initial underwater tests involved the editor holding his breath at the bottom of a swimming pool whilst Rob drove the boat. Like we said, it was done on a shoestring…

58 RIG TESTING
On paper, it looked like we were going to be creating history. Take one huge tank, jack it up so we could lay underneath it, rig up a camera, place a rig into the tank (with no point) and then get a revolutionary view of how it’s actually sucked into a carp’s mouth. In reality what we got was a split tank, 350lts of water in Rob’s living room and a bill of around £1,250. Hey, you win some, you lose some.

57 CARP TRACKING 
The concept was, just like Below The Surface and Rig Testing, revolutionary: we’d chip a carp and then monitor its movements around a lake. It was going to be amazing. The only problem was, it did exactly what we expected it to do – i.e. move away from angling pressure and onto uneaten bait.

56 JASON HAYWARD 
It was in issue 45 that Jason Hayward showed the angling world (a) how to sharpen a hook (b) why it makes such a huge difference and (c) we then backed everything he’d just written with some microscope photographs of his hook points over standard ones. It proved hugely popular - suprisingly...

55 MICROSCOPE SHOTS
The shots we got of Jason’s hooks were impressive – unlike anything that had gone before – but in 2011 we really upped the ante with some super, super microscope shots – one which showed really what a hook point looks like – and this of course upset a few of our advertisers.

54 WRAYSBURY SLIDE SHOW
We’d heard that Simon Scott’s 2005 Wraysbury Slide Show was amazing; truly awe-inspiring, however, we never made it along to any of the shows so the editor came up with the idea of running it in printed form. Simon agreed to it and it worked, proving to be a huge success with the readers.

53 A NEW ERA IN DESIGN
In terms of design and content, this was the biggest single issue change since CARPology started but in the March of 2004. The editor had been working on the re-brand for four months and the end result was a brand-new set of typefaces, new colours, new styles and best of all, a new collection of articles.

52 SPOT COLOUR COVERS
To our knowledge, at the point we run our first spot colour cover (basically a fluorescent colour), no other angling title had produced one. The first one appeared on issue 19, to which we followed it up with a gold version on issue 25 - tying in perfect with our Golden Ticket competition.

51 A DAY’S PIKING WITH PETE REGAN
Anytime spent with Peter Regan is awesome. It’s literally a laugh a minute (as we’re sure you could imagine reading his articles), but to go fishing with him - truly a pleasure and honour. Not only is it entertaining, but eductional. Pete’s an amazing angler - whether that’s fishing for carp or pike.

50 MEETING BEN GRATWICKE
We first met Ben Gratwicke through Simon Scott, and in 2004 Ben invited us down to his fish farm for an open day. Since then we’ve gone on to become great friends and we have him to thank for numerous features including Carp Tracking. 

To continue reading our Greatest 100 Moments, from 49 down to 1, click here