Nigel Sharp On The Road Lake

Nigel Sharp: One of only two anglers to have caught a 40lb mirror, 40lb common and a 40lb leather. He’s fished some of the biggest and hardest waters in the country and had results at all of ’em. The man’s on it… He knows what he wants to catch and he does. Gents, it’s Nigel Sharp on The Road Lake.

“Nigel, you had a result on Frimley, but when did you move onto The Road Lake?”
“Around late June 2003”

“Can you tell us a little about the Road Lake?”
“It’s a small old lake on the Long Field site; it’s deep and weedy.”

“What sort of stock of fish has it got?”
“Its got around thirty-seven fish in there, that’s including the stockies that went in at the beginning of last year. I think there was a dozen or so put in then. So there’s probably twenty-five what we call original ones in there.

“How many thirties and forties would you say are in there?”
“From what I’ve seen and what I’ve worked out from captures, there’s probably about fifteen 30lb+ fish in there at the right time of year.”

“So how much time were you putting in when you first started fishing it?”
“When I first started fishing it, I was just weekend fishing – Fridays to Sundays; there’s a 48hr rule on there, which is good. Occasionally it would just be one night a week; say just a Saturday night. I wasn’t doing as much as I’d like to, but I had a very busy year at work. Normally I like to do evenings and stuff like that, but I just didn’t have the energy!”

“Did you start to fish it more as time went on?”
“Not as much as I’d like to really. It’s quite handy really because it’s a small lake and close to the car park so it’s not too far to hump your gear! Fishing Burghfield and places like that, it’s quite exhausting fishing and the last thing you want to do after five hard days at work is lump your gear round a big pit and look for a fish. The Road Lake was good because you could just drop into a swim quickly straight out of the car.”

“Was there a target fish that you were particularly after?”
“Not really, no. There’s a good head of decent size carp in there so I just wanted to fish it for bites really. I didn’t know a lot about the lake, but my eyes popped out of my head when I first saw the lake and the fish.

It’s like ‘I’ve got to have some of this’ and then as time goes on and you get to know the names and the characters of the fish, then you start talking about certain ones. How it’s growing, where does it get caught from. Pinch Belly was the first big fish I saw in the water and recognised, so that was sort of a target. I’d like to catch that one!”

29lb of Pearler!

“How do you go about trying to catch a particular fish? Clover for example – how do you go about targeting that one fish?”
“Normally it starts with seeing a picture of it, you think ‘that’s the one I want’. It’s a good-looking fish and a big fish as well. Whether it’s a forty-pounder or upper-thirty, it doesn’t really matter with the weight, it’s just nice to have a big fish.

Normally the character gets you struck by it and then if you hear something about that fish you tend to listen hard and try and remember everything. Where it was caught from, what it gets caught on, if it was caught on a bottom bait or a pop-up, a lot of bait or a single bait. Trying to put your head inside the fish’s head, really.”

“What areas and features are you looking for when after a particular fish?”
“Normally I like to find out which swims they come from. With The Road Lake it is very weedy so anywhere where you could get a bait to the bottom was a result and you’d fish it. Personally I tend to fish the silty areas – I don’t tend to fish the gravel so much as I find the fish to be much more riggy. They tend to get stuck in more on silty areas. I try and learn as much as possible about each swim.”

“Why do you like silty areas so much?”
“I always think with bars and that, most of the food will roll to the bottom anyway. With silt areas they tend to be the flatter and I like to fish a slacker line and I feel I can get my tackle out of the way and hidden better. I tend to catch most of my bigger fish from these areas. I’m not sure if there’s that much natural food on gravel, where in silt you tend to get bloodworm, mussels, etc. – all the stuff carp like to eat.”

“Were you fishing one particular area of the lake or were you moving about?”
“I was moving about a lot, and to be honest, I’m quite a mobile angler, that’s maybe due to fishing the big pits. I did start to think that was the wrong approach on The Road Lake. You’d walk round and see an opportunity, but by the time you’d got back round there with your gear, that opportunity had gone. You're then stuck in a swim and the chance has gone. Maybe I should have just carried a rod and a net and walked around the lake all day looking for chances.

There’s a lad on there called Dean, who’s started doing very well and he’s a very static angler, where me and a few others were runabouts, and I started to think that Dean’s results were coming because he was sitting on his hands, where everyone else was moving the fish to him. I don’t know, I might be wrong.”

“How did most of the opportunities come?”
“Most of it was stalking in the summer. Come October when the cold winds starting coming in, the lake died really. The lake changes and everything really does shut-up shop. No big displays in the morning, nothing. There was one swim that fished really well in low-pressure, but everyone also seemed to realise this so you couldn’t always get in there. In the end I decided to concentrate on one bank, confidence-wise I knew my bait had been going in that area.”

“Did you ever see any fish suss out the rig?”
“On quite a few occasions really. The fish do like to visit the marginal spots and as a result everyone was baiting little spots; probably baiting on top of each other. Everyone was baiting with tiny pellets, small and crushed boilies and the fish appeared to start feeding very tight. They were coming onto an area and would literally just kiss the bottom before moving off, or they just sat on one spot and wouldn’t move – literally no more than 2-inches.

If you did get a take you’d lose the fish. That wasn’t down to bad rigs; it was because they weren’t moving their heads. I did lose three fish because of that reason. They just weren’t getting the bait and hook far enough back to get a good hookhold. I tried everything to get a better hookhold – it did work on a couple of occasions, but most of the time it was a nightmare!”

“What’s the best opportunity you’ve ever had?”
The best opportunity I’ve seen was when I walking around. I’d lost a fish the previous night off a marginal area and I was just walking around looking when I found three 30lb+ fish feeding in close. They moved off the spot, so I got my bait in perfectly and sat back on my bucket.

Two of the fish came back in; one of those was straight in over the bait and the other came in and picked up the bait. I just saw the fish go on its side out of the area; I pick up the rod and it was off again. Now that was probably the most confident take I’ve ever seen.”

“What are the perfect weather conditions in your opinion for small lakes like The Road Lake?”
“Normally low-pressure with a warm wind and rain. That usually results in less people on the bank, so less noise, etc.”

“Were there any times when the weather was really terrible and you were convinced you wouldn't get a bite and then someone did?”
“Probably when I caught Clover myself! There had been low-pressure with a strong wind and rain in early January. When I arrived at the lake it had just blown itself out and the weather slowly calmed down to no wind, high-pressure and very cold. When I got in the bag that night it was freezing. I got out during the night to go to the toilet and when I got back in, I pulled it right over my head – cover as well!

I never even looked at the lake, I just thought ‘that’s never gonna go, it’s not the right weather’, and then the next thing I knew, I got a bite!”

“How long into your campaign was it before you banked Clover?”
“I started in late June and caught Clover on the 9th January. I realised what fish I was looking at towards the backend of August/September. I caught a couple of the other original fish in the warmer months. The first one I caught was a fish called Orange Spot and came from the spot where I ended up catching Clover from. I also caught one they called The Large Fully-Scaled at the beginning of September. Both of those fish went 29lb+.

The night when I caught Clover, Terry and I kept talking about the fish – Clover. I had to leave, because the 48hr rule, but came back and got in the same swim. I had baited each spot with ten or so boilies and once again, that night we sat there talking about Clover. That night I caught her, and we all commented that we had talked that fish onto the hook!”

Good social afterwards?!
“It was quite a sociable session anyway before I caught it, but we had a great laugh the following night.”

“Were you putting a lot of bait in during the winter?”
“Not much bait at all. I was baiting with 10 or so of those barrel-shaped boilies. I didn’t really want to encourage birds to dive on the spots and I didn’t want to overfeed the spots either. I wanted to maximise my chances of a take. Sometimes I would crush up a few boilies and fire them out in small PVA bags. The lake’s that small you could fire a 10p size PVA bag into the middle of it! I just wanted to get the smell of the bait into the water.”

“What bait(s) were you using?”
“I did try the pellet thing, but from personal experience I’ve found fish harder to hook on smaller items – mini boilies, pellets and suchlike. If I can get ’em to eat boilies, then I’d rather just use boilies.”

“What is your rig set-up like?”
“That was the other thing, I did play around all the time. I started thinking ‘pop-ups aren’t the ones’, and then someone would go and catch one on a pop-up, so I’d try that. Then I’d change to a bottom bait or a slow sinking bottom bait. Most of my bites were on bottom bait set-ups. I did catch one fish on a stiff rig set-up and that was The Large Fully-Scaled. It was a midday take; it was straight in its face and it took it.

The rig I caught Clover on was a longish link. I’d been using short ones most of the time, so I thought I’d give it ago and it worked”

“Is there any other particular fish you would really like from there?”
“I would still like to catch the Big Dink, which comes out around 40lb mark. There’s another fish called Pinch Belly, and a Linear which goes up to 37lb. They are still young fish and still growing. I’m far from done with it yet!”

“We hear there’s an unknown monster in there. Can you tell us more?”
“That rumour comes about from a fish that was put in there called The Long Lake Fish. It came out of the Long Lake years ago. I think it went in The Road Lake, then it was taken out and then put back in the Long Lake and finally put back in The Road Lake. It hasn’t been caught for five years, but anglers say they have seen it swimming about. After a summer on there, I don’t think that fish’s is still in there. I’d like to be wrong; I’d like to think the lake did hold a mid-forty, but I’ve not personally seen that fish myself.”

“Many thanks for your time, Nigel. Best of luck with the fishing.”