How Gaz Fareham cracked Swindon Park Lake

Key point 1: Motivation

I remember the conversation still clearly to this day, it was the winter of 2004 and I was sat with a rather drunk Mike Willmott in a couple of big leather seats near the bar. I’d had a few myself and fuelled by the alcohol, and a bit of bravado, the thought of slotting in amongst the madness at the park seemed almost quite exciting… Drunks and weirdos: check. Drug fuelled kids and sound systems: check. Five thousand ravenous water birds: check. Swims that require a drill and raw plugs to set-up on: check. Mike is a man of resolve though, and he was adamant it was worth a go just ‘on the days’ and that it didn’t matter that I couldn’t get a night ticket – I’d tried the year before to get one, but to no avail, Swindon residents had first priority and there had allegedly been a literal scrum and ensuing fight at the ranger’s office on the day they were offered, anglers being able to collect in person back then.

The park was a mad old place to angle, but it did have its moments of peace and beauty

I had written off the prospect of fishing the Swindon park lake until I could get a proper ticket, as at the time I lived a fair few miles away in Manchester. Later that night, along with the help of Dave Gawthorn, we carried Mike back to his room, but the following morning, through my own bleary eyes and thick head, I was still as excited by the prospect as I had been the night previous, even minus the beer. I do tend to be a bit impulsive, and this occasion was no different. My northern mates thought I was mad, making a 320 mile round trip to kip in my car in a rough car park in January to fish day sessions on what was considered a pretty tough water. Maybe I was a bit mad, but in hindsight I think the nature of the challenge was definitely part of what made it so attractive, that and that dirty great big mirror known as The Resident that Mike was cradling on the cover of Carp Life.

Even though Mike had written about the lake in his book, it was still pretty much off the radar and I’d seen very few pictures of the big over-slung lipped, thick wristed mirror anywhere in the press, and I liked that too. For me it was my first real venture south as well, out of the North West scene, and that was pretty exciting in itself.

The infamous diving board

That January, the first evening I arrived after dark, quite why I cannot recall – and the first person I bumped into, quite by chance was Mike. He was set-up in the Bus Stop, with no shelter, just his bedchair tucked in the corner out of the still blowing southwesterly, along with the bits of broken glass, fag ends and empty Stella cans. The lake had a brooding atmosphere, it felt sinister and dark, smelt a bit of piss and stale beer and had an atmosphere quite different to how a natural pit might feel. In my head though I’d already committed myself, even though I was actually pretty intimidated, not just by the difficulty of the angling that lay ahead, but also the possibility of getting clubbed round the head and my kit nicked. Taking on something like that needed a big reward, and for me, my fickle little heart had set itself on The Resident, and so whatever it took, I had decided I would give it. Sometimes deciding to do your own thing, and knuckle down to achieve goals that are meaningful to you alone is hard, especially in an ever more social and interconnected carp world, but looking back now, I’m ever so glad I did as my time spent on the park are some of my fondest and most vivid carp angling memories.

Bus Stop life. Glamorous game this big carp lark!

Key point 2: Days only

Travelling the 160 miles and three hours from Manchester was no issue, if anything, I enjoyed the distance I was putting between myself and the familiarity of my local waters, the fact I could only fish days was initially something I thought of as a hindrance, but once I’d actually rationalised it in my head, I convinced myself I might be able to use it to my advantage. I stripped my kit down to the absolute basics – just a tiny rucksack, a handful of leads and end tackle, basic tea kit and a couple of flapjacks to keep me going during the day. The main weight in my kit was actually made up of boilie, often up to ten-kilos or more for a three-day session.

Staying on my toes

I started on the park in January, and that first winter I wasn’t using much bait, I just fished mobile, with singles and a scattering here and there, but I had big plans for the summer. From what I could gather, no one was really baiting that heavily and most anglers, naturally, would spend their sessions plotted up in one area. I had to make the most of being mobile and staying on my toes as being restricted to just the days, I had no choice, so my approach was based around lots of boilies and a few different spots that I hoped I could drop on, dependent on how things panned out.

My usual agenda was to arrive for sessions late in the evening, that way I could have a leisurely scope around to see where people were set-up, have a chat and a social and to see if I could see anything show as dusk fell. Based on the weather, where anyone else was, and some gut instinct, I would then bait a handful of spots with a few kilos each, dependent on the distance, scattering it wide with a stick or catty. The evening would be spent drinking whoever’s tea I could, soaking up whatever bizarre ambiance the park would bring, getting a kebab from the mobile van that was on the roundabout and then wandering around the paths like a lost soul in the dead hours, dodging the drunks and sitting and listening for shows and trying to get a fix on where I thought the carp were. I’d stick it out for as long as I could handle, then retreat back to the delights of my Astra estate and the luxury of a sleeping bag laid out in the back, setting the alarm for before first light.

On the first morning, after a night in the back seat of the Astra, I’d usually barrow my kit to the big concrete wall as it gave a perfect view of the entire northerly end of the lake and then just sit and watch for a while, sometimes one would give itself away, other times I’d make a decision based on a hunch or things I’d heard during the night, but within a few minutes I could have a few hookbaits fanned out over an area I’d primed the previous evening.

The park had an interesting topography: essentially you had a strip of gravelly, sandy ground that ran all the way around the lake, from the margins out into the lake, fading out into silt at various ranges of anything between ten and forty yards, dependent on where you were. I opted for a really simple approach, flicking out a bare lead well beyond where I knew the rough ground started and slowly dragging it back, waiting to feel the cling of the silt give way as it firmed up and for the first tap of the rough ground. I’d then take a few feet of line off, clip it and retrieve, clipping on a rig and a two-bait stringer before plopping it back out. No marker floats, no excessive casting, just a minimum of disturbance and a few nicely positioned rigs, and on a few occasions I caught within a few hours.

First blood, over an area baited heavily with 4-5kgs of boilie the previous evening and a night spent sleeping in the bushes with no rods out

‘Once or twice I still had wet knees and four or five mirrors on the SD card from the day’s angling’

In hindsight, only doing the days genuinely offered me a few advantages, firstly it meant I would be baiting sometimes up to half-a-dozen spots a trip and flitting between them, capitalising on where they happened to turn up. It also meant I wasn’t precious about staying in any one area, I was quite happy to do a three-day trip and fish four or five swims. I’m sure having the lines out for the nights helped as well, effectively resting the areas while I fished in others. A couple of times I caught from two or three different areas in one trip, sometimes having one of the night syndicate lads waiting to move in behind me after I’d caught a few during the day. Once or twice it was a bit painful to have to wind in and welcome someone else into a swim to then have to go and sleep in my car or the bushes for the night, but once or twice I still had wet knees and four or five mirrors on the SD card from the day’s angling as they did, and it would be another week or more before the area would do another bite.

The majority of the time it was just a buzz to stay on my toes, and drop on another baited area the following day, trying to nick another bite from elsewhere, and occasionally even managing it. The nights spent tucked away out of sight sleeping in the bushes were also a lot less painful when I’d caught one too.

Looking back, it was obvious really why it was working for me, and in some ways it was an ideal scenario, even if it was one I was forced into and one that I struggled myself to recreate once I’d finally got myself a night ticket the following season. On a number of waters over the years I have really valued keeping the lines out of the water for big periods, especially when it is an area I have baited heavily and I’m sure it helped massively on the park. Carp are undoubtedly aware of when they are being fished for, and I’m sure being able to feed in areas with no lines in made them far more confident than arriving on spots that already had lines in as well.

A winter sunset

Key point 3: The convergence factor

I’ve said this before, but it is something I firmly believe in when it comes to getting things right with big carp on difficult, low stock venues. Things just have to converge for you, and the whys and wherefores of how that happens can appear somewhat mystical at times, to tap into that ‘can’t put a foot wrong’ state of angling is precious, and doing whatever you can to hold onto that thread when it is working for you, whatever it takes, is just as precious too.

My one winter bite: the lovely Split Barb. I spent a lot of time on the park during the two winters I fished up there, for very little, but I knew The Resident had winter history and the thought of cradling that big mirror was always a driving force

There’s definitely been spells in my angling life when, to all intents and purposes, I have been fishing really well, but no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, how much bait I put in, how sharp my hooks were, or how many sleepless nights and early mornings I put in, I just haven’t been able to get things to converge. The weather might have been just out, or work would get in the way, or some errant occurrence would scupper a prime chance like I’d wind in to find a swan mussel clamped on my hooklink, or a freshly dropped branch my rig had been sat on. There’s an old Danish proverb that goes along the lines of, ‘The only way out, is through’ and when things are going like that, that holds ever so true. You just have to dig deep and crack on.

When you only fish short sessions like I do now, the convergence factor is even more pertinent, and can be the difference between an incredible season, and a run of the mill one when chances are few and far between. Add the pressure of other anglers into the equation and I think sometimes you might realistically only get a mere handful of chances in a full season when you’re actually in the right place at the right time, the rest of the time one or the other is out. If you capitalise on them, you might have a season of a lifetime, if the ‘carp protectors’ as Terry Dempsey affectionately calls them, get in the way, it is so easily just another one lost to the archives of ‘if only’s’.

During my time on the park, I seemed to have a number of occasions when things converged perfectly – arriving to a lake that hadn’t done a bite for weeks, seeing nothing and dropping on an area I’d baited the week previous, to get a bite from a 38lb mirror within two hours, those kind of things happen fairly rarely, to me at least, but they seemed to happen with a welcome frequency on the park. I felt like I was making the right decisions most of the time, and whilst that came in part from watching and fishing as hard as I possibly could, there was also a healthy dose of luck or something else involved there too.

A moment away from the madness

Key point 4: Spread 'em wide

In reality, it wasn’t so much a conscious decision at all, more one born from necessity – I wanted to get big quantities of boilie out quickly, at fairly short-range as I was often priming a number of areas each evening, so I opted for a stick, but instead of one or two at a time, I’d shove ten in there and spray them out, spreading the bait over a good twenty-yard area. It meant I could get a few kilos in within about five minutes at ranges of thirty- to forty-yards and as I was often baiting just into, or just after dark to avoid the gulls, I didn’t want to worry too much at all about accuracy.

At the time on the park you could use bait boats, and whilst not everyone did, quite a bit of the baiting was being done with boats (and to be fair, by lads like Bert with great success) Even if it wasn’t done with a boat, it would usually be with a spod to avoid the hordes of gulls and often to a float, so things were usually fairly tight, and often to ‘known’ spots. Looking back, fishing so mobile and just fanning three stringers out at first light, often into areas I’d seen shows in, was a great scenario and I think the fact everything was well spread was letting me get away with casting on top of them. I’m sure if I’d been baiting tight and trying to get hookbaits onto tight spots while they were feeding, I wouldn’t have been able to get away with it, but they were moving in and grazing over big wide areas and lots of bait, and having three hookbaits fanned out in the general area meant that during the course of the day I had a pretty good chance they’d come across one of them. In some ways it seems a bit counter intuitive, I was using a lot of bait, sometimes baiting with up to four or five kilos an evening, knowing I could well only get one day’s angling in the area, but it definitely worked for me during that spell.

Rigs were simple, and ever-faithful

Key point 5: Confidence and consistency

I caught virtually all the park carp on the exact same rig, and during the two and a bit seasons I only lost two, and neither were to hook pulls. One was to a snag down in the diving board corner, and the other was to an untried hooklink I was testing that parted on the loop knot. Other than that, despite some of the longest and hardest battles I have ever had with fish, every single one stayed on the end. One even stayed on the end for about ten minutes before I even got to the rod, the planes and park life drowning out a muffled Neville from the next swim!

I used my ever faithful, super simple size 6 Wide Gape rig for 99% of the angling on there, and to be honest, didn’t really even think about rig choice the entire time I was on the lake. All my thoughts were focused on finding them and baiting, and that was it. I had absolute confidence in my presentation and that was worth its weight in gold.

Key point 6: Going with the gut

I caught quite a few of the park carp in the end, and a few of the better ones, but The Resident was still proving elusive after a couple of years of angling there. I’d spent a lot of time during the second close season watching and baiting on my way to and from my trips fishing Pingewood, or sometimes even making the 320 mile round trip from Manchester just to bait up.

During that time I had only seen The Resident a couple of times in The Bay. She was always a loner though, never with any others and I could never get her to come close enough to feed on the spots I was baiting, she always wanted to sit out a bit further than the rest, and a bit deeper, never venturing up onto the shelf or into the shallower water. One evening in August, after fanning my rods out all along the edge of the rough ground as I always did so religiously, and had done me so proud, I decided to wind one in and put it fifteen-yards or so further out into the silt. There was a big weather front due that night, and something in my heart just told me to re-do one of the rods and put it out a bit deeper, and beyond the main spread of bait.

At about 10pm I had the take, and after a fraught, brutal battle in the freshening, drizzle filled southwesterly, I shuffled the mighty Resident into the net. Was it a well-tuned sense of ESP? Intuition? Good fortune? God knows, but whatever it was, I’m just thankful I trusted my heart and decided to re-do that rod that fateful August evening. No bullshit, just bloody good luck!