Monday, 17th.June 2019

Paddlesworth, Pollard, Peg 44

12.45
So I’m back down ‘Polly’ after a bit of an enforced break; the old back has been giving me grief plus, we have had some terrible weather - biblical amounts of rain which has caused flooding in many parts of the country including here locally.

My walk up and down the lake did not inspire; I neither saw nor heard anything so my choice of peg was made on nothing more than instinct and access to an easy-to-camp area.

So Peg 44. How am I going to fish it?

Peg 44, Pollard Lake
You can tuck yourself away nicely behind the marginal foliage here and actually feel you are fishing a carp lake rather than a featureless 'hole in the ground'.

Well, certainly not like last time! I was stacking up the ‘slabs’ like breeze-blocks so bottom fishing is most definitely out! In view of the fact I wasn’t pestered by the Bream when I changed to zigs, this is now my preferred tactic and thinking about it, zigs on ‘Polly’ offer advantages that bottom fishing does not. For a start, they are a good way of avoiding the Bream; secondly, they enable you to ‘search’ the water column, and this is made easier by employing what I am using today - adjustable zigs. These are the proprietary Nash version although I have no doubt that the Korda one is equally as good. With the Korda one however you pay for a boom which you may well not need.

The setup is simplicity itself. Onto the line goes the 3 ozs. lead. This lead is fixed to a large ring (which comes with the kit) via a clip-link, the mainline passing through the large ring. The Float is threaded onto the mainline stem-end first and passed all the way through until it exits the hole in the ‘fat’ end. A size eight quick-link swivel is tied to to the mainline using a seven-turn Blood Knot and pushed into the recess at the ‘fat’ end of the Float. All that remains is to clip the three-foot long nylon rig to the quick-link and slide over one of those extra long anti-tangle sleeves to lock it in place.

The ‘business’ end is a size 6 ‘Korda Mixa’ hook tied ‘knotless knot’ style with a 15mm. Pop up secured by the shortest hair you can get away with.

Casting is a bit of a faff… because the thing has a tendency to tangle, what you have to do is secure the pop-up to the Float with two pieces of dissolving foam. The first one is licked and stuck on to the Float at the ‘fat’ end and the hook poked into it. The second nugget of foam is licked and stuck over the top to hold the whole thing in place.

Nash proprietary Zig Kit and 3 ozs. lead. The Korda version is just as good.
Two nuggets of dissolving foam are used to secure the rig to the side of the float; this is to stop the thing tangling in-flight.
The 'sight collar' is removed as I want the thing to be as unobtrusive as possible.

I did a survey of the swim before casting out and found twenty feet at eight wraps. A couple of pulls back and the bottom shelved up steeply to ten feet - so right away here is a bit of a feature. I chose to fish two different depths:

l.h. rod: 7 feet down
Centre rod: 7 feet down
r.h. rod: 2 feet down

One of the rods I will raise and lower depending on how things progress.

Setting the depth is quite straightforward. After hitting the clip, the rig goes down on a tight line and eventually touches bottom whereupon everything goes slack. Opening the bail-arm allows the Float to come up through the water column to the surface where three white dots are visible - the two foam nuggets and the white pop up. Through binoculars it’s easy to see the Float and it’s just a case of winding down (with the rod in the rests) until the Float disappears; continue winding and the pop up disappears. This brings the bait to just below the surface. To fish it at a set depth, it’s a matter of hand-lining a foot at a time, line onto the reel. I have a bit of insulating tape fixed on the rod at exactly one foot from the bail-arm of the reel so I know that 7 feet here equates to pulling the bait down from the surface the exact same distance. Voila… now all we do is wait.

13.40
So why pop-ups and not the more up-to-date and modern zig foam or zig aligner? well, for a start, whilst I accept that tiny pieces of foam fished off the bottom do indeed catch carp (in fact I have used foam zigs to good effect myself in the past) I just have no confidence in them in the wide open spaces of Pollard Lake. Expecting a carp to find a minuscule piece of foam in all that expanse of water is a pretty tall order although I accept introducing spod mix over the top would help. My preference for a pop-up is informed by how we used to catch carp many years ago.

Peg 44. It's ten feet out to about six wraps - and then it shelves steeply down to twenty feet at eight wraps.
In the shallower water however I found 'Eel Grass' growing to within four or five feet of the surface.

Back in the day, before Kevin Maddocks published the ‘Hair Rig’ we used to side-hook the then, new fangled ‘boilies’. Then someone hit on the idea of using ‘floater cake’. This employed exactly the same mix we used to make our boilies - but with extra eggs so the mix was ‘sloppy’ and this would be baked in the oven on shallow trays, the ensuing ‘cake’ cut into one-inch cubes which were then threaded onto the hook to replace the bread crust which we had hitherto been employing.

In those days we believed that as soon as the sun rose in the morning, the carp would come off the bottom and cruise around at mid-depth (or somewhere between the bottom and the surface) and it was here you had to fish for them, hence, the use of ‘Anchored Crust’ - superseded by the then ‘Floater Cake’.

So this is what I want my pop-ups to do - take the place of the old fashioned ‘floater cake’.

15.45
It’s nice and sunny at the moment but with a stiffish l to r wind blowing down to the bottom end of the lake. This must be warming the upper layers, hence, fishing the top third of the water column. At the moment I’m leaving the depths at 2, 7, and 7 feet down. I haven’t seen anything on the surface so I deem the deeper rods are more likely to produce a fish. Had there been fish ‘showing’ I’d have fished another rod a couple of feet under the surface.

17.00
Reset the middle rod to 10 feet down so the format is:

l.h.rod: 7 feet
Middle rod: 10 feet
r.h. rod: 2 feet

18.00
Just seen a fish; way over to the right and half way across. No-where near my zigs but it’s evidence there’s something out there!

18.13
There are fish way to my left. I can hear them but I can’t seem them. There is another angler up there so moving is out of the question.

They are on the back of the wind; the old rule of carp following the wind doesn’t seem to apply here. Very likely angling pressure is the cause as the ‘middle’ part of the lake has anglers all along it. Something to remember.

18.30
There’s another fish - out to the right again and not far out. Would be a bit cheeky putting a bait over it as it’s near the guy next door.

18.40
I’ve adjusted the format again to:

r.h. rod: 2 feet
Middle rod: 9 feet
l.h. rod: 5 feet

20.07
Let the middle rod up a couple of feet so the format is now:

r.h. rod: 2 feet
Middle rod: 7 feet
l.h. rod: 7 feet

20.25
There’s a lot of fly-life on the wing this evening; this might suggest that the small black foam zig might be more successful than the pop-up?

All this fly-life buzzing around rather suggests a small black zig might be more acceptable to the carp than the pop-up.

Tuesday, 18th.June 2019

07.30
It was a funny old night. I had several twitches on the rods and got really excited assuming a take was about to take place - but nothing developed into anything. I suspect the culprits to have been Bream picking up the line as they made their voracious way about the lake, scavenging whatever they could find.

Around midnight I awoke to see the outline of a fox with its head inside the bivvy, looking for all the world as if it was going to jump on top of me! I’ve heard of night-time carp anglers being attacked by startled foxes before and had no desire to have a nocturnal scrap with old ‘Reynard’! I made a sort of anguished grunt from within the sleeping-bag - trying to let it know I was awake - but trying not to startle it. It jumped back several feet and circled back around my swim, once again peering in, curious I expect as to what had made such a pathetic squeaking noise! This time however I gave it a more commanding “Shoo! Clear off!” And it ski-daddled away. It did spook me however and I zipped the door of the bivvy down to exclude all would-be interlopers!

The morning is benign and calm. There is no action on the lake apart from bleary-eyed carp anglers extricating themselves from their pits, yawning and stretching.

Carp lakes are their own private communities where the inhabitants come and go, but all share the same life ambition - to catch a large carp! They are the most concentrated centres of mass inactivity in the world!

08.45
For the last couple of hours of the session I thought I’d re-cast and re-position the rods.

I’d seen fish on the top much further out than my 8 wraps that I had been fishing so I decided to see if I could get the ‘zig floats’ up without having to hit the clip of the reel. This worked ok on all three rods and I am now fishing at 40-45 yards on each to the following format:

r.h. rod: 2 feet
Middle rod: 4 feet
l.h. rod: 7 feet

On reeling the rigs in, I encountered a lot of resistance as soon as I was in the shallower water. Eel Grass.
I don't know what its proper name is but this stuff is about six feet in length and covers the shallow plateau in front of the deeper water.
On reflection, this is quite a feature and I think fishing a zig just above it at three or four feet down may well have been the way to go. (Provided you could have got a zig float up through it of course).

I’m a lot happier with this. Closer in there is a lot of ‘Eel Grass’; I don’t know what its proper name is but it must extend upwards of six feet from the bottom judging by the length of the stems. There doesn’t seem to be any further out where my rigs have landed, but this is a definite fish location feature, confined as it is I think to the shallower ten foot deep area.