How Gaz Fareham outwitted Yateley's carp

At certain times in your life, things just fall into place, and for me, Yateley and The Car Park Lake was definitely one of those times. I’d always had a huge desire to fish Yateley, growing up reading the old Big Carp magazines, and working with Terry on his now iconic ‘In Pursuit’ book cemented that in my impressionable little teenage mind. Something about those shadowy old shots, and big leathery old mirrors had just completely captivated me, the atmosphere of the place just seemed so compelling and I desperately wanted a little piece of it myself.

My first ever Car Park dawn, in The Middle Secret. The least fished, and least productive swim on the lake – the perfect place for a nervous first night!

As it happens, I never really thought I would: Bazil died, then Chunky, Single and Ugloe followed and it seemed the old ones were on their way out. When Jumbo died and the Pad Lake was drained down, I’d almost written off ever having that chance. I was living down in Cornwall at the time news of Bazil dying filtered through, working on my art degree in Falmouth and I remember being shocked by the news, I think I somehow expected them all still to be there for a good few years to come, and the dog eared copies of In Pursuit and Bazil’s Bush that I’d taken to uni with me were still with the hope I’d one day get to fish there myself.

I spoke about the convergence factor in the last of these pieces, and once again, that played a huge part in me ever setting foot on the lakes in the first place. I left Falmouth after four years of Cornish life, beaches and harbours, and bitter cold, clean offshore waves. That time demarked a time in my life when angling had taken a bit of a back seat, but when I’d returned up North, I was keener than ever and after my time on the Swindon Park and Berkshire club lake, I was looking for somewhere new.

Freedom… After a year on the CP I was starting to understand what Hampshire G had meant when he’d said not to let it ruin me. I was well and truly lost down the rabbit hole

Only a year later though, I’d moved back to Exeter and the South West, completed a PGCE teaching course and living back down in Falmouth, and once again my carp angling future seemed pretty uncertain. As fate would have it, I met a girl, fell in love and moved to Dorset for a new teaching job, ultimately ending up living in Bournemouth. After a winter on Roach Pit, a spring on Nutsey and Vinnetrow and suddenly having had a whole world of new angling opportunities opened up to me, once again, fate played its hand, and quite unexpectedly, my Car Park ticket turned up. If things had swung ever so slightly the other way, I would probably have never had my chance. I bumped into Hampshire Graham on Vinny that spring and had told him my CP ticket had come up, his reply was quite simply, “Don’t let it ruin you…” and at the time, I wasn’t quite sure what he meant, but over the course of the next three years I was to find out…

The shout went up from the Curly ‘FREEEEEEEEDDD-OMMMMMMMM’ and Jon Pack’s love/hate affair with the CP was brought to a close with Heather, in March. An epic capture and a privilege to witness

Key point 1: Dreams

Follow your Dreams, my Kings and Queens

‘Follow your Dreams, my Kings and Queens’. That is how the quote starts on the last page of Tel’s Still Searching, with my little pheasant drawing below it. It’s a simple quote, but an incredibly powerful one. When it actually came down to starting at Yateley, I was pretty nervous about fishing the CP, in fact so much so that I decided I’d avoid the opening few weeks just to let things calm down a little before starting. Having read so much over the years, and poured over the Bazil and Heather stories time and time again, the thought of walking in the footsteps of Tel, Ritchie, Rob Maylin and so many of my angling idols, along with the impossibly difficult reputation the lake held, was almost just too much. I wasn’t so worried about the possibility of a two or three year blank, I had mentally prepared myself for that, but something about the place and the history of it just scared me a bit.

Looking back, I made so many good friends there, and literally have nothing but good memories, so like most things in life, the prospect is almost always far worse, or more worrying, than the reality. I could’ve just written it off as a place consigned to history and teenage fantasies and never gone and given it a go, but I’ve always prided myself in my willingness to try anything, and not to be put off by the size of a challenge, or my fears or worries, and the CP was no different.

I couldn’t even hazard a guess at how long I’d spent staring at these over the years. If you want something bad enough, you’ll make it happen

Lots of my mates thought I was mad, my mate Charles had done 130 odd nights for nothing back in the 90’s on The Pad, so I was quite keenly aware that the possible outcome for a few years of effort was very little, but in a way, I think that aspect just made me even more determined to try to see it through.

I only had 48hrs a week to play with, and no real possibility of getting up mid-week for a recce or bait up with my teaching commitments, so time was tight, but even with that constraint, like anything in life, if you want it badly enough, you’ll make it happen. I think following your dreams is an incredibly tough thing to do at times, but however things play out, at least you can say you tried.

Yateley dawn. Late summer morning in the Curly Wurly. The atmosphere at The Car Park Lake was just electric - I loved every minute

Key point 2: New skills

You Don’t Know Everything

For me personally, I never arrive at water with my chest pushed out, thinking for one second I’m going to take it apart. I have always really disliked that arrogance in others and think the ego side of carp fishing can be a bit of a downer at times. For me, it is not a conscious decision, I think I am often just very much in awe of the waters I fish, and with that comes a deep sense of reverence and respect for the quarry and environment. I take nothing whatsoever for granted, but I don’t think that comes from a lack of confidence in my ability, maybe rather just having a hell of a lot of blanks under your belt makes you realise nothing is a given? Not on those kinds of waters anyway.

When I started on the CP, there were still a number of the older hands there, either fishing, or still visiting most nights for socials. Steve Pag, Fudge, Scotty K, Benny Hamilton, Lee Picknell and a host of others of which the list is too long to name. I knew I had a hell of a lot to learn from those lads, who had not only fished The Car Park for many years, but who also just had a fair few more years under their belts on the big carp scene and who had fished all over the country, proving themselves on some of the hardest waters in the land.

Along with them were some seriously sharp younger generation anglers: Hemp Boy, James Turner, James Davies, Phil, Chris Muir… I think being open and inquisitive is always an infinitely better prospect than being closed and arrogant. None of us know everything, we’ve all got lots to learn from each other and the sharing of that experience is everything within carp fishing, for me at least. I saw some amazing bits of angling on the CP, things I’ve taken elsewhere, little rig tweaks or tactics and I did mention it briefly in an earlier piece, but it was more defined and prevalent than ever on the CP, having the tightest knit social scene I have experienced anywhere in my 25 years carp angling. The evenings spent with the likes of Scott, Lee, Benny and Paggy etc. felt like a huge privilege, and it taught me a hell of a lot. Not only that, but it was a bloody good social as well, and made the whole thing incredibly fun along the way. The laughter and riotous socials will stay just as ingrained in my mind as the carp themselves.

Key point 3: Different approaches

Pressure cycles

Looking back now, I think the tactical aspects of the fishing on The Car Park really were key, and in fact I think have probably been more key than anywhere I have ever fished. Those carp had quite literally seen everything by 2008 when I started on there, they’d seen Tel’s three rod trick, and twenty years more pressure after that, they’d seen Steve Pag’s edge angling, they’d seen Darrell Peck’s boilie approach, Darren Miles’s big beds of hemp and tigers, they’d seen Ev’s groundbait, Little Rich’s legendary gambit, Bucks, Wayne Dunn and Dave Mallin, Shelley, they’d seen Jon Coxhead’s devastating pellet in the edge approach and they’d seen Gary Lewis’s massive deluge of boilie… the list goes on and on. Literally a cast list of some of the UK’s most successful anglers had all grafted away on there over the years and given it their all, and some, like Jim Shelley, with no success at all.

The lake had probably seen more pressure cycles than anywhere, ever, but I suppose most importantly, they’d seen calculated, concerted efforts and a serious intent of approach for years, and years, and years.

At the time I started on there, there didn’t really seem to be one particular method that was in-vogue and in fact for my first couple of trips, I had no idea whatsoever as to what anyone else was doing as I hardly spoke to anyone, but it did seem that with the advent of bait boats, that people were favouring ultra tight traps and a fairly lightly baited approach. In many ways, that does make lots of sense, you were only fishing for a handful of carp, just six mirrors, and a few commons, and so fishing for a bite seemed entirely logical. Of course it did do bites, and that approach was favoured because of just that, but I didn’t have a boat that first year and so was resigned to the good old spod, catty and stick, so I knew I would have to angle differently. I had also never used a bait boat before, so I knew it made no sense to just start doing something because it was the done thing.

In the end, I opted for something I thought might just offer me a little edge, alongside a few tried and trusted methods and rigs. I went for big beds of seed, boilie and nuts, but heavily washed out and steeped in the hemp/nut water. It was nothing new at all, just a combination of old methods but on such a heavily fished pit, I honestly didn’t see how you possibly could do anything genuinely new, so really it was just a slight variation on a theme.

Over the years I’d done loads of angling with nuts and seed, I love fishing like that, and know it is a superb summer tactic and one I had utmost faith in, but I did know it had been done to death on The Car Park by the likes of Darren Miles just a few years previous. I also knew the boilie thing had been done to death too not long previous by Gary Lewis, and Darrell before that.

That one bite gave me all the confidence I needed, and also everything I’d ever dreamed of

The morning after the Dustbin, it was away again

One thing that had changed for my time on the CP was the 48hr ruling that had come into place. Back in Darren, Darrell, and Jon’s day, you could do a week in a swim and so consequently, that brought the possibility of big hits of bait into play, it also brought the possibility of waiting for a few days for them to get on a big hit. We didn’t have that luxury, as you only had two nights to play with so I decided I would try to emulate the ‘third night’ effect by heavily washing out my boilies before the trip.

My reasoning for the washing out was that the CP carp had become accustomed in the few years prior to seeing fresh bait arriving on spots every two days. It seemed they would often tune into spots a bit later though, often really getting on areas after people had left. My usual script was to boil up a big bucket of hemp two days before a trip and pour it straight onto a few kilos of boilie steaming hot. To that I would add a tiny sprinkling of corn and all the liquid from the can, and a sprinkling of tigers and some of the liquid. I’d let that steep for a few days and by the time I’d arrive at Yateley the boilies would be very soft and heavily swollen with hemp liquid, and the seed and nuts just starting to turn sticky. It was somewhere between Shaun Harrison’s method of air-drying and ‘washing in’ with hemp water, and Benny Hamilton’s ‘heat treatment’, using boiling water to kick-start the process. Both of which I’d already used in varying methods, but it was on the CP that I honed down a method that was to stand me in good stead for years to come and I still use to this day. In fact, right at this exact moment there are two big buckets of that exact mix steeping in my van ready to go out into the pit tonight! I still rate it more highly than any other technique for bait prep I’ve ever used.

On just my sixth night on The Car Park, after arriving at first light and seeing a few show, I put in a full bucket on a beautifully clean feeling spot long out of Dessie’s, and drew my first blood with the Dustbin. I was expecting to settle in for 20, 30, 40 or 50 nights before working a bite, so I was completely dumbstruck really. In hindsight though, what I think it did do was to give me the confidence to just fish how I knew, and that I could catch them. The fact that I caught another the next night just cementing that further!

Mid-summer in Dessies: BBQ on and The Dustbin under my belt. Life was sweeter than ever and there were still more targets to aim for

Key point 4: Feature finding

Clean as a whistle

One thing that did still ring true from everything I’d gleaned and read about the CP over the years was that finding the cleanest of the clean spots seemed to do the bites, and the spots with sediment still on them just didn’t, even though they got fished and baited on a very regular basis. Consequently I was as fastidious as I possibly could be about finding the finest, smoothest feeling gravel spots, and I would religiously smell my lead and leadcore after it had been retrieved from the pit after a night. It is something I’ve done for years anyway, but it was an important tactic on the CP for me. If it was fresh and clean, I felt the spot was a goer and worth persevering with, but if it smelt even a bit dirty or sour, I’d discount it. Sometimes when I was on certain spots, my rig and lead would smell fresh as a daisy, but the back few feet of my leadcore would smell silty – that was when you knew you were on the button and accuracy really was everything.

It was amazing how much activity there would be some mornings, with big swathes of sheeting up peppering the usually flat calm surface

As I was casting, and using tiny balanced tigers as hookbaits, tangles were an ever present worry and getting the exact drop I wanted was imperative, consequently, getting my rods out was a pretty fraught experience and would sometimes take ten, twenty, or even thirty casts and sometimes a fresh rig if the point became damaged or the link kinked part way through. ‘Melt downs’ were not uncommon at all..!

Rancid spots, flat spotting out in the Curly’s long water in the autumn. They didn’t always eat whatever was out there and as the summer’s wore on, sour spots would become a real issue

I know some people I’ve spoken to over the years think that side of things was all a bit talked up, and over-hyped on The Car Park, but when you started to talk to lads that had been around the CP for a while, it was frighteningly acute how spotty the pit really did appear to be. The Gate swim spots being one example. The tree-line spot would usually do, maybe, one or two bites a year, despite getting fished for probably four or five nights a week, yet the little bar out front, which felt lovely, and you could see them sheeting up on at times and was a spot they frequently passed over, hadn’t done a bite for quite literally years, despite being most people’s ‘second rod’ spot in there. Quite why, who knows? but it just seemed they wouldn’t feed hard enough there to get caught. My tigers always came in with a little black stain on the base of the cork from that spot, telling me there was a thin covering of sediment on the spot and also that they weren’t feeding on it heavily enough to clear it back to gravel, and seemingly hadn’t for years. I still persevered with it almost every night I fished in The Gate, but you know what the result was of course…

Almost every day was spent up the trees at some point. It told you a lot of what you needed to know. Bars tree crows nest vista!

Key point 5: Bite times

During that first year, when I spent the majority of it angling out in the pit on the open water spots hoping for Heather, I really valued resting the swim and keeping my lines out for as long as I possibly could, rather than, as some did, keeping them in to minimise disturbance and have a rig out there for as long as possible. My reasoning was that the CP carp didn’t actually seem to mind the disturbance, in fact it seemed that they were almost entirely unaffected by casting and leading around; I watched my mate Gee casting a marker to the Curly Long spot from the top of The Bars tree once, I could clearly see what I think was the Dustbin sitting just feet behind the spot when the lead clattered in – it didn’t even flinch! I suppose a consequence of being fished so hard for, for so long, was that, maybe counter-intuitively, there was no sense of neurosis in them, or spookiness, just the assured knowledge that casting happened everywhere around the pit, every day, and in reality wasn’t particularly connected to their captures, whereas line draped over weed maybe was.

My game plan revolved around baiting heavily earlier in the day, usually before lunchtime, and then clipping and readying the rods but not actually casting out until later in the evening. Almost all the bites on the CP during my time on there, from the open water at least, came in the classic first light to 10am spell, so I reasoned the longer they could drift around over the spots during the days with no line draped over the weed, the better.

Key point 6: Tweaks

The little things

I knew The Car Park fish loved bait, there was no doubt about that, but it seemed they were unbelievably adept at cleaning people out and getting away with it. I always thought the little traps were just too easy to get rigged out on, and felt the way to get a bite might be to give them so much bait that they just couldn’t ignore it, with the hope that they’d lose themselves in preoccupation to the point of becoming catchable.

The amount of activity some mornings on the pit was incredible, with huge sheets of fizz peppering areas as the big mirrors stoved through whatever was out there. I watched Arfur barge the Baby O off a spot once to literally gorge itself on pellet – how the hell they didn’t get caught more was beyond me sometimes!

As I was using big buckets of what was predominantly hemp and boilie, I figured that rather than use a boilie as a hookbait, which would’ve been the obvious choice, I would use a delicate little tiger instead, hoping that maybe they’d be thinking the hook would be in one of the boilies, and not in the little unsuspecting nut that was in amongst it all. Whether or not my results had anything to do with that I have no honest idea, but I caught five carp that first season and somehow managed to average a bite roughly every six nights, which for CP standards, was pretty good, even if it was one mirror and four commons.

Benny Hamilton said to me that autumn that I should stop using the nuts if I wanted to catch some of the other mirrors, he might have been right, but I did stick to my guns and the following year and managed to get another two mirrors under my belt, but we’ll leave that for next time. Thanks for reading.