Tigernut & Peanut catches fully scaled Mirror
17/08/2009
I arrived at the lake at around 2pm on Saturday afternoon to find the car-park packed. This is quite normal for a weekend which is why I chose to do my 24 hours from Saturday until Sunday. I can only do 24 hours as I have 3 kids at home and it's the summer holidays. I'm not really bothered about the number of other angler’s onsite as they all stay close to the car-park which I feel forces the fish to move to the northern end of the five acre lake, which receives very little pressure.
The lake has two islands, one at the southern end and one just over half-way, there used to be a third but is now a shallow plateau which becomes exposed in summer as the water level falls. It's off the back of this third sunken island up that has a ring of weed running around it. I've been fishing to the weed and amongst it for obvious reasons the main one being that the carp can be seen patrolling along the weed by climbing the tree that overhangs my favourite swim.
The first thing I noticed on arrival is the strong northerly wind driving relentlessly into the top corner of the lake, I decided to leave my bait-boat in the car as the chop of the water would drown out the sound of the lead hitting the water and the wind would make it awkward to control my bait-boat anyway. Now I know some people don't like bait-boats but you can't argue with the fact that they are very handy for being stealthy as there's no lead or pva bag smashing into the water spooking any fish in the area.
I set two rods up with Tigernut & Peanut 18mm boilies with 3 bait stringers on 8 inch mono hooklinks tied to Drennan Barbell Specialist hooks in size 8. My third rod was baited with a floating and a sinking plastic sweetcorn and a pva bag of halibut pellets and sweetcorn with tuna in sunflower oil as I've found this to be the most effective method and always catches. All was quiet until about 8pm when the sweetcorn rod (middle rod) tore off resulting in a mid-double common, which came as no surprise so I cast the rod back out with a Tigernut & Peanut boilie and 3 bait stringer and changed the right hand rod to plastic sweetcorn and pva bag. The next take came to the untouched left-hand boilie rod at 10:30pm. The fish buried itself in the weed making it easier to land. At first I thought it was another mid-double but on lifting the net realised it was another 20lb. On weighing the heavily plated mirror I was pleasantly surprised to see the scales pull round to 23lb 4oz and only my second carp over 20lb caught on boilies from this lake, which is a good result for the Ocean Fresh bait as I've caught 13 different 20lb carp to 26lb and always had at least one rod baited with boilies of some sort.
The next rod to burst into life was the middle one (again the Tigernut & Peanut Boilie) that was moved to the position of the first take on fake corn and resulted in a mid-double mirror. Again the rod was changed to fake corn and cast back out and the right-hand rod was swapped back to a boilie which was only in the water for about 40 minutes before another angry mirror of 18lb made a mistake? This time though I cast it back out with the same boilie on and a fresh 3 bait stringer.
I started to pack away at lunch-time on Sunday to be home for tea at 5pm. everything was loaded onto the barrow and all that was left was to reel in a pack away the rods, alarms and net. I started to get a few liners on the right-hand boilies rod so I'd decided to leave that until last which was proved a good move as it burst into life with the line kiting through the water round to the right, heading straight for the sanctuary of the reed-bed in the margins. I really needed to wade out but the margin drops off very sharply into about 7ft of water so all I could do was push the rod tip as deep into the lake as I could and hope the fish would turn away! Fortunately it did and I started to gain some line only for it to turn and head for the reeds again, this time I knew that if I could keep the pressure on I could get it close enough to me to miss the reeds and into the net. I managed to get to the edge of the reeds with the net to see the fish turn from the net cord and dive causing the 15lb hooklink to snap! Gutted! That was definitely another 20lb mirror on the boilies. I got it to within 8ft of me and saw it's fat red belly as it dived.
Well that's all for now as I only had a 500g bag of boilies but am ordering more for this weekend.
Hope the boilies are working for everyone else.
Thanks.
Gary Daly