Its who you know.

Friend of the website Martin aka Martinoff had invited me down to a private estate lake near Romsey in Hampshire, I have been here a few times before and love it, its quite rare to be able to fish in near silence, apart from the wildlife, sadly for me and Steve its highly private and only available to a very select group who have to work for a certain high end supermarket, Martinoff is a farmer for the supermarket so is allowed to have a ticket for the water, and is allowed a guest, which on this occasion was me.

Sadly Martin had been told there will be another 5 people on the lake when we were going, which may not sound allot on a lake of a few acres but we are used to having no one there when we fish, so we decided to get there early so we can secure a good swim, so I was up at 3am, van loaded by 3:15am and at Martins house in Stockbridge just before 4am. We arrived at the lake just before 5am and happy to see there was no other cars in the car park, result.

We grabbed a bag each and went for a wonder, after a lap there was nothing showing around the lake, not even bubbling, so we decided to set up across from the islands as we have done well here in the past.

We returned to the van, loaded the barrows and headed off to the swims, as I had the rods already set up it took moments till I was fishing, 1 was set up for solid PVA bag fishing, the other for maggot fishing. I cast them both to the island as close as possible, with the Delkims on I sat back to enjoy the view and make a nice cup o tea.

It took a hole hour for one of Martins rods to scream off resulting in a small Common, at the same time mine screamed off but sadly dropped off. I started baiting the margins as they can be very productive.

So far I had no bites on the maggots but the odd bleep on the boilie rod, my boilie of choice is CCMoore Live system with matching pellets.

Finally the alarms screamed into life which resulted in a little Common around 5lb.

Around 10am the other people had arrived and the fishing had gone very quite, and the weather really hot, so I went for a wonder. Most of the Carp where up on the surface, so I had a go for them using standard surface tactics, but to no avail, they were being infuriatingly fussy, just nudging the bait, I tried bread, banded dog biscuit, side hook fake biscuit but nothing worked. So I returned to the swim and put the rods back out to the island, baited the margins and had a kip.

Nothing really happened for a fair few hours apart from a couple of bleeps from my boilie rod, and as there was movement in the margins I decided to reposition the rods there, the right hand rod was on the boilie, and the left on maggot. After casting in and re-baiting it was about 15 minutes until my maggot rod screamed into life, it was obvious from the take that the Carp had some real issues, it powered all over the swim for around 5 minutes then it was netted, the result was a beautiful 15lb 12oz Mirror, 10 minutes after the rod was back in it was away again, this time a stunning dark Common of 10lb.

The time was now getting on, it was about 7:30pm, which is not that late but when you have been up since 3am it was starting to get to me, so we packed up slowly hoping for one last fish but sadly it did not happen.

We fished the venue in hard conditions, cold morning, hot day and high pressure, not excuses but this can be a really productive venue on the right day, but still a fantastic day and a big thank you to Martinoff and look forward to returning if given the chance.