Bish Bosh

As the weather was looking pretty good, and a good friend asking for a fish, I decided it was time to return to Bishops Green for a few Carp....Hopefully.

When I fish Bishops Green there are a few swims I favour so I decided on a early start and picked James up at 5:30am and was lakeside by 6am.

We grabbed a bucket and headed round the lake for a look. There was not a lot to go on so we headed to the far end of the lake where there is good marginal growth.

I started by putting a couple of handful of pellets either side of the swim in the margins then sorted the gear. I had two rods on alarms using pre-made leaders with short hook links in solid PVA bags with 12mm pellets tipped with plastic corn soaked in Betalin dropped in the edge.

It was a cold morning promising to get hotter during the day but still had a run pretty soon after casting in with a 11lb 11oz Common as my prize.

Old school friend James was soon catching and was all going well, but when the sun got up and it started to get rather hot the fishing died down with just the odd fish.

Bishops Green is normally a great place for surface fishing even when its cold but it just didn't happen today, and with 6 Carp each we headed home.

A decent day for the conditions and although the ticket price has recently doubled in cost to £10 a day for 2 rods its worth every penny.

You can't get better.

This month we decided to fish Ashmoor lakes, mainly because we was unsure on the weather so decided to keep close to home, plus we love this fishery.

I picked Steve up at 6:45 and arrived at Ashmoor around 7am.

We grabbed our gear and headed around the ponds for a look. Fo

r a change we headed to the far side of lake 2. I had a Barbel rod set-up for Carp and a flat bed feeder on a quiver rod for everything else. I was experimenting with my Carp set-up and had 6 solid PVA bags on leaders ready made to tie on and try, first was a bloodworm dumbbell tipped with flouro corn packed with 1-4mm pellet. This was placed in the corner along the bank, and before I had even sorted the next rod it was away, a lovely Mirror was my prize of a few pound, great start. Next I put out a peperami dumbbell tipped with pink corn, again in PVA bag put in the same place. This time I even got round to sorting the other rod then it screamed off, and another Carp was in the net. I put a pineapple pop up out next and carried on with my feeder fishing, which was disturbed yet again by the alarm with another Carp. With this I put the Barbel “sleeper” rod out the way so I can concentrate on my feeder fishing.

After a couple of Bream and a small Carp it slowed up, so we moved back to our old favourite swims the other side of the lake, I feeder fished the island in front of me and had my sleeper rod fishing with the yellow pop up in the edge. I was catching well with many Carp and Bream but started to slow. I swapped my feeder rod for float rod and started fishing in the edge with instant success, adding Perch and Barbel to the tally of fish. The sun was now well up and it was surprisingly really warm for March, so I shallowed up and started Rudd fishing, I have no idea how many I caught but it was a lot with the odd Bream and Hybrid.

There was a few Carp cruising about on the surface so I decided to have a wonder around and found a few fish in lake 1 around the pipe, there was two younger anglers fishing lake 1 in the far corner but they had no luck, and after catching 5 off the top I did wonder why they was not following suit.

I returned to my swim to finish the day float fishing and catching a few more.

As usual we end the day with a shed load of fish and wondering why people fish anywhere else, and the fact there was 5 other people fishing which only one other angler caught a couple of fish, what they do is just mind boggling.