Location Corner: Simon Crow
Ever turned up to a lake and been unsure of what to head for? Here we describe a situation to a successful angler and get them to detail what they'd do.
Finding the fish first and being on them is great advice for any session, but how do you put that into practice at busy day ticket venues? Well, one carper that’s fished a mass of different open access waters is Simon Crow so lets see what approach he decides upon with our hypothetical venue this month.
To get things started we’ve told Simon that he is permitted three rods on this fairly busy complex of two lakes. The bigger Lake One is five-acres and anglers already occupy pegs 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 10. Lake Two is 2.5-acres and similar to Lake One, half the swims are already taken. The fishing conditions are dry with broken cloud cover and a warm 8-12mph northerly wind is blowing. The air-pressure is fairly average for the time of year at 1020.
Okay, that’s the scenario, now lets see what swim Simon goes for and where he’d cast his rods…
“This is a really tricky thing to do because there would be lots of factors on the day that would influence my decision to fish a certain swim if it was a real situation. The first thing I can say is I would always have a good walk around both lakes before I’d choose my swim and not only have a good look at where the other anglers are, but also how good they are. I like to think I’m a fairly good judge of character when it comes to seeing if someone is a good angler or not just by talking to them, so I’d definitely want to know where the decent lads were set up. Another thing, which would be important in my decision, is what the fish stocks in the two lakes are. If one had a forty in and the other only had doubles in, I may plump for the one with the biggie in regardless since you always have a chance of catching it if the rods are in the water. If however, the two lakes had a similar stock and a similar standard of anglers on, then this is when I would look at the conditions on the day and there is one particular swim that stands out like a sore thumb to me. This is Swim 8 on Lake 2.
“The reason for this is not because of the wind direction or the weather conditions but simply because of the ‘no fishing’ bank. A no fishing bank spells carp to me. They know where people are and even if anglers catch fish from baits fished along the no fishing bank, there is likely to be a lot more fish in that vicinity that anywhere else because they will know there are no swims there. Every single no fishing bank I have ever come across has carp close by.
“As for the location of my baits, this would be dependent on where the two close-by anglers are fishing in Swims 7 and 6. There is a chance they would have baits fished tight to the no fishing bank so I would out of courtesy ask them first where they are fishing to and work from there, scattering my rods along the no fishing bank as close to the margin (depending on depth) as I could. Tactics-wise I’d be inclined to walk round to the no fishing bank and spread a line of bait along its length and then fire my hookbaits across. This way my baiting would be more accurate and defined to the margin rather than risk loose areas of bait. I’d then be inclined to fish bags or stringers on simple braided rigs with matching hookbaits to the feed.”