They Don't Make 'Em Like That Anymore - Petals

Rich gravel
Those seeking the rich seam of gravel buried under West Oxfordshire have provided us, quite unwittingly, with some of the most famous carp, and carp lakes, of the modern era. Gravel-hungry giants Smiths and ARC (Amey Roadstone Construction) have harvested the area since the 1960s and as the diggers moved on they left in their wake the famous Linear Fisheries and the home of the fish featured in this piece, Linch Hill Leisure Park complex.

John Kaliki
Dug in the 1960s and 1970s, the lakes at Linch had fallen under the management of John Kaliki, an employee of ARC and someone who was central to the development of carp fishing across the ARC portfolio of waters. John moved carp around the collection of pits that ARC owned (a cluster of which dotted the landscape around Witney in Oxfordshire), creating some incredible fisheries as he did so. Now, the precise breakdown of the stock in Linch Hill’s Christchurch Lake is unclear, but it’s safe to say that it received fish from the netting of the Roughgrounds lake in Lechlade, as well as from lakes and wash pits that held carp already on the Linch Hill site. Linch also received fish from a netting of a lake up in Birmingham that Kaliki’s team had overseen. We can only speculate which of those stockings Petals came from, but we do know that by the late 1980s it was living in the least mature of the pits on Linch: the six-acre Christchurch Lake.

Writing headlines
Given that it was the furthest walk from the car park and contained the smallest average fish on the site, local legend Geoff Adams nearly always had the lake to himself when he fished it on and off in the late 80s. It’s fair to say that he caught loads of carp from the rather lunar-looking Christchurch (even in the depths of winter), including a young Petals at 10lb 4oz. It’s hard to imagine, but just ten years later, the lake was full of big carp and had begun grabbing the attention of anglers from across the UK. As the millennium dawned Petals was way over 40lb and, in fact, topped 48lb when well-known Midlands carp man Lee Collings caught it in 2001.

Super busy
Martin Pick was one angler who’d been attracted to the complex since Petals had made its big push through the 40lb mark. “I’d decided that I wanted to catch a forty and Petals was one of the only accessible ones that I knew of.” Travelling from Leicester, Martin faced a busy lake and resolved to book off Fridays so that he could travel down on Thursday nights to make sure that he could get a decent swim ahead of the weekend. To him the corner swims were prime, initially because they had more water that couldn’t be encroached (Linch was busy by then and frequently saw 20 anglers on the tiny pool). It didn’t take long before Martin was getting among the other good fish in Christchurch, catching loads on Zigs and bottom-baits out in the pond.

Target-hunting
He watched the likes of Ian Poole and Jon Finch successfully target the lake’s big ’un before a conversation with Jon helped to change Martin’s approach. “I’d been moaning to Jon that I didn’t feel that I was going to catch Petals,” Picky said. “Jon told me that I’d have to target it where it got caught most from and that meant in the margins around the corners of the lake. With this in mind, I wrote down all the captures that I could think of and plotted them on a map, which did indeed reveal that it favoured the corner swims. All I had to do was get into a corner swim and hope that it was the right corner that weekend.”

 Memorable trip
Martin also had an Elstow Pit Two ticket at the time and decided to flit away for a trip to Bedfordshire and it was while he was up there that a phone call from his close friend Barry Davies would unknowingly inch him closer to catching the giant mirror. “Baz phoned me on the Saturday to tell me that he’d just caught Petals for the second time, saying ‘It was out last Saturday, it’s been out today, so you need to make sure that you can get down next Saturday’. Having quit his job two weeks before, Martin was in the perfect position to do just that. As May clicked over into June in 2002, he arrived for what was to be his most memorable trip ever.

“I got straight into The Point swim,” Martin remembers, “Which controlled a fair chunk of water, including a small bay to the right. I kicked off with my usual Zig approach and quickly got among the fish but it was while I was up a tree watching the water out from the swim that things started to really happen.” 

Martin spotted a group of big carp approaching up the margins, a group that included eight known thirties (including The Box Common, Slate Grey and Pooley’s) with the huge Petals at their head. 

“I watched them swim past and Petals dropped down to feed in the margins, very briefly, before carrying on through. That was all I needed to see, so I whipped the rods in and set up a solid bag, which I planned to wade onto the spot that Petals had fed on. As I got close to the spot the top of my waders was nearly at water level and I glanced right, spotting Petals approaching. Unable to move, I knew that I was about to be spotted. Because of how deep it was and the extreme clarity of the lake, it was like I was actually in the water with it and the big mirror came right up to me, within a rod length, and tilted over to one side to look right at me with one eye. Once Petals had broken eye contact and headed off, I was pretty sure that I’d messed up, but placed the bag anyway.”

Blown away
As June 1st 2001 dawned, Petals was still in the area. Martin had already stayed a night more than he’d planned because the England football team were in action and he’d planned to head back for that. However, with Petals about, he stayed. The minutes ticked by and as Martin watched, Petals approached the pile of groundbait that he’d packed into the solid bag the night before. After a couple of mouthfuls, a small common came steaming in and smashed Petals in the flank, causing her to swim off. 

“I had a hissy fit” Martin admits, “I thought, ‘Right, that’s it, I’m going home’. I popped round to see Hampshire Chris opposite, because he’d move into my swim after me, leaving a lad watching over my rods. On my way back round to the swim, I stopped to chat to an angler on the bottom bank and was just telling him that I wasn’t destined to ever catch Petals when I had a one-noter! I charged straight into the water fully clothed and bent into the fish, which came to the surface to reveal the giveaway circle of scales in the middle of its back. I knew exactly what I was attached to and once it had waddled into the net, things literally became a blur. I honestly couldn’t understand what people were saying to me. I’ve never been like that since with a carp (and he’s had loads of big ones!)—it just totally blew me away. Petals was my first forty, and the first fish that I’d ever really targeted.”

New targets 
Just a couple of years later, in August 2004, Petals died. Of course, that was anything but the end for the lake itself and Christchurch remains an incredibly prolific big carp water and the biggest mirror in there now, Scar, has in fact exceeded the benchmark set by Petals well over 20 years ago, topping 50lb.