With
the weather looking half decent I decided to take a work friend and his
son fishing, along with my son to see if I could get them all hooked.
I
had already decided on Bowsaw lake due to its varied species, but sadly
due to matches we had to look else where. Eventually I decided on
Bishops Green lake near Newbury, as there are many small fish for the
kids and my mate Tim, and I'll stick a couple of rods out on alarms for
the bigger Carp.
We
arrived about 1pm to find a few people at the car park end of the lake
so we set up at my preferred other end of the lake, where there are much
better margins to fish. Firstly I chucked out a few handfuls mixed
pellet next to the reeds whilst I put together my rods. I soon had a
solid bag on the money whilst I started setting up the float rods for
the others, luckily my son has been fishing a few times and here before
so he was able to set his own rod up by himself. Sadly for them before I
had even set up the first rod my alarm screamed into life with a feisty
little Carp around 4-5lb, in my rush to sort my gear out earlier in the
day I had forgotten the spreader block to my landing net so I had to
get Tim to scoop it up using the net by hand, not the best but it's what
we had. With the float rods soon in the water they all started catching
Gudgeon as Roach and seeing there faces when the bites started was
magical, it was soon obvious that they where hooked. Watching them fish
was better than me catching, and took me back to when I first started
fishing in a very similar way. I had been firing out dog biscuits for
the past hour or so and they were feeding quite confidently so I rigged
up a surface bait with a controller float and cast past the fish and
reeled in. They were really tricky and had no interest on bread so
swapped to a banded dog biscuit. I was watching a decent fish swimming
from side to side and tried to cast out and pull it back in front of it.
And it soon came up and took it good as gold. It caught really hard for
a few minutes then was awkwardly landed by Tim. Just as we was putting
it on the mat my alarm screamed off and had another Carp on. I let my
son Liam handle that one, although a lot smaller at just over 3lb it was
my sons first go with a 12ft rod and he done really well. Once the
pictures where taken the fish were slipped back and we continued.
After
a few more Carp, Gudgeon and Roach we packed up and headed home. A
great day and successfully got two more people hooked onto the this
great sport.
