Willows Farm 27-8-14

So the local tackle shop had advised me of some changes at Willows Farm. The Deep Lake had been drained, the big fish moved and it had been subsequently restocked as a match lake. A quick look on the web showed lots of photos of small carp and bream with match weights up to nearly 200lb for a six hour match. Clearly, this needed checking out. 

Match results: http://www.willowslakes.com/matches-groups/

I used to fish Willows a fair bit, but it tended to be a bit hit and miss on the main lake – you could bag up one day and struggle the next. So, it’s probably been two years since my last visit.

I arrived before 7am to await the gate to open, only to find 8 cars ahead of me, which is a lot for midweek. Six of those cars belonged to a group planning a knock up match on the lake – I was relieved it was just them and not a lake full. They headed for the near end so I headed to the far car park and based on the match results decided to look for the pegs in the lower thirties.

Peg 30 turned out to be the first peg on the high bank, so I settled for 31 which had options in the margins both sides. It looked deep with a sharp drop off and a high bank behind; it was going to be a long day of high shipping on the pole.

The right side of the peg - I never did get round to trying under the bush

The left hand view, that twig was just the tip of the iceberg - that snag extended out for a couple of yards and cost me two fish

I cupped in some 4mm pellets at 11m and started to set up for pole fishing an 8mm expander; a 0.8g float, 0.19mm line and a size 14 hook (B911). The depth was not as bad as I feared, about 6ft at 11m, a little longer than my top set, but not too bad. I set up just over depth to allow for a little tow.

After 10 mins I had seen no indications of anything (although there were the odd fish topping in the distance) which was a little concerning, when there was a sharp bite and the float sank. No 16 elastic kicked in, and soon an immaculate 3lb mirror carp was in the landing net. Next put in, another fish and so on and so on. It took a while for the bites to come, but it was very much a bite a chuck with a fish most put-ins, varying in size between 2lb and 4lb. All the fish were clean mirrors, with heavy scaling – only a few were fully scaled but most were heavily scaled.

A typical mirror carp from the new match lake

By an hour down I’d had 33lb of fish (all mirrors), but I knew I could do better – if only I could get the bites to come more quickly.

Hour two and the wheels fell off. The bites went iffy with the float dancing but not going fully under and I was striking the expander off the hook more often than not. I tried some other pellets (nothing), smaller soft pellets (striking off) and shallow (nothing). It was very frustrating – I could see bubbles in the swim, but when I did get a bite it was just the odd small carp. It didn’t make sense, I was getting concerned it might be crayfish.

Then after 45 minutes of messing about, in a moment of desperation I tried a banded 8mm hard pellet – this is not my usual weapon of choice, I find expanders get more bites – but it worked. Fished just on the bottom I started to get good solid, hittable bites. And, they were coming quickly. Bingo. Put in, bite, strike, land. You get the picture.

By just after noon, a little over 4 hours after I started fishing, I was up to 120lb. At this point the bailiff appeared and provided some good info on the water. 7500 carp had been stocked along with some bream, there were also a few (and just a few) bigger ones in there, but generally it was feeder that won the matches, but pole worked as well.

I persevered but at about 140lb it slowed up again and bites were harder to come by. As a quick experiment I shallowed up the rig to half depth and changed the feed pattern to a few pellets every 30 seconds or so. 3 quick fish followed to banded 8mm hard pellet, so I set up a dedicated shallow rig and went shallow.

Fishing shallow was productive as I started to put together another run of fish. Each fish needed to be worked for – they weren’t lined up, but they were a slightly better stamp on average (including a 7lber and a 5lb 8oz fish) and the weight climbed further. By 3pm I’d got up to 216lb and it was time to call it quits. Not bad for a first visit, if only I’d sussed it out earlier I think 250lb would have been possible. But still, averaging 30lb an hour with smaller match carp is not to be sniffed out.

Can’t wait to go back once these fish have grown on a bit.

Catch List:

Mirror Carp: 65

Common Carp: 1

Roach: 2

Bream: 2

Total weight: 216lb