Candy Corner, 04-05-2007

I decided to take a day off work as it was Friday and have a few hours at Candy Corner in preparation for our match on Sunday.

My old man decided he was going to come along for the day out, so we stopped off for a breakfast on the way out there and make a full day of it. My dad doesn’t fish and judging by the weather in the morning; overcast with a bit of rain and quite cold, I though he might end up sat in the car all day.

I managed to get on a peg (12) with the wind over our backs to try and keep a bit warm.

I had a couple of pints of casters with me but wasn’t too bothered about using these as I know you can usually catch on them. I was going to try paste for the first time this year, see if I could snare any of the resident lumps. I was also hoping to catch shallow with the pellet on the pole. With this I only set up two rigs, a 4×10 Big H for paste close in and a 4×10 KC Carpa Shelf for up in the water.

I started off on paste just fishing it on the hook and striking it off after a minute or so, whilst I kept feeding a few pellets at 13 metres on the pole line. Indications came straight away with the float moving around all over the place, after a couple goes I finally got a proper bite and a Crucian of around 2lb soon hit the net. A few more followed but Crucians being as they are the bites were very finicky and it was hard to tell liners for proper bites.

After about an hour I decided to have a try up in the water with pellet. Luckily the fishery has a 13 metre pole limit as you can only use their pellets and with 4mm being the only feed pellets they sell, I would be struggling to get them much further out with any sort of control. I’d been advised by the owner to use the 6mm hookers as these were what everyone used. I’m not sure about this, I’m sure he’s right but I prefer the hookbait to be as close to what I’m feeding as possible. Indications were there straight away and it wasn’t long before I was in. Again these were only small Crucians & stockies in the 1-2lb bracket but I was catching them faster than I was on the paste. I fished like this for another hour or so and managed to snare a couple of bigger carp of around 5lb amongst the smaller fish that seemed to be resident in my swim.

For the last hour I decided to come back over the paste line to see if any bigger fish had moved in. I wasn’t getting as many indications as before which I was hoping was down to there being less smaller fish in the swim. This theory was right as the stamp of fish had increased to between 4 and 5lb. Not wanting to get stuck in the rush hour traffic I decided to have one more chuck. The float buried almost straight away and after a struggle I managed to net the beauty above. A beautiful common with a right fat belly on it.

Roll on Sunday.