I don't fish Gold
Valley very often; it's a bit of a trek, quite expensive and you cant
guarantee a good day. However, since I was still craving a good day
out on the pole I bit the bullet and headed off to Aldershot ready to
empty my wallet.
£11 for one rod, £3.25
per bag for some fishery pellets and I was ready to go (ouch).
However I was also surprised at how it had changed since the last
time I was there – building work, new roads, AWOL islands and
serious slash and burn on the bank – not pretty.
I decided on Bungalow
Lake for the day – I like Gold Lake too, but the fish tend to
switch off a lot as the day goes on – whereas on Bungalow you can
usually pick up some fish in the margins late on if all else fails.
I settled on about the
6th peg along, a little before where the second island
used to be, mainly because there were fish moving and it had a nice
margin bush to go for on the left.
In went the usual
pellet/pole gambit for starters, 11m pole line, 22 elastic, 11mm
expander, 6mm feed pellets and 0.20 line to a size 8 hook fished on
the deck. Sounds heavy, but I've found it's a good opener. After a
few minutes there were bubbles in the swim, and eventually a bite for
a 5lb 8oz common – nice.
The next fish took a
good half-hour to arrive, a similar common of 5lb.
I had been getting some
liners, so I tried a shallow rig with no success, there were fish
cruising around just sub-surface, but they weren't feeding. So back
to the deep line and a small skimmer gave me about 11lb after the
first hour – not great but a start.
I then dug out some new
cad pots for an experiment, I put the catapult on one side and tried
to focus the feed over the float each put-in. It helped, a lot.
Suddenly I was getting more regular bites (and hardly any iffy
knocks) and although I wasn't catching just carp, the bream and roach
coming in were excellent. Nice skimmers from 12 oz to 2lb, and some
cracking roach around the 1lb mark, plus a few carp, with the best
going 9lb. This pattern continued for a little over an hour and put
over 35lb of fish in the bank. Normally I get a bit upset if the
skimmers are getting to the bait before the carp, but on this
occasion a fish was a fish and it seemed appropriate to just crack
on.
Hour three started to
get a little tougher. I was still catching the same mix of fish, but
having to wait longer for bites. A few lost fish (foul-hooked) didn't
seem to help either. By the end of this hour I was up to about 55lb,
but it was looking like hard work.
I tried a few different
things, including my inside line, but that ended up in a root and a
lost hook, so it was back to experimenting on the 11m line. Cupping
in heavy helped a little, but only for a few fish and it looked like
the great mid-day switch off was here stay. Highlight up until this
point was a series of roach – 6 fish for over 6lb, the best going
1lb 8oz. Now they may have a bit of bream in some of them, but some
were definitely pure roach – nice fish.
So I plodded on, tried
a few thing, shallow, banded pellet, 8mm hooker - the works. Nothing
really delivered, I was still catching but there were some long
breaks in the proceedings.
By 2pm I'd edged up to
74lb, but I was not ripping up and trees, so I made a call to do a
couple of things.
- I went and helped out the ten-year-old kid on the next peg. He'd been fishing his heart out for a few hours, but only had a dozen small silverfish to his name. I changed his rig, showed him how to feed for the rudd, changed his seat set-up and then watched him catch 6 good rudd in a matter of minutes – him and his dad were well chuffed. He then showed his mate, and they both started catching. I also lumped some pellet in the margin for him – something for him to try in the last hour before he went home.
- I went onto the margins (but a little further out, sort of 2 + 2, so as to miss the roots) using a mix of pellets and paste on the hook with 6mm pellets going in via the cad pot.
After five
minutes I got a faint knock that was clearly a liner – but how big
was the source of this? After the next five I got a proper bite and a
good zing of yellow elastic. A brief, but hefty fight produced an
excellent common of 10lb 8oz with a stunted tail.
Ten minutes
later a repeat performance resulted in a hook pull.
Five minutes
later and the hook didn't pull as an 11lb common hit the landing net.
Ten minutes
later and I was into an even bigger lump that was desperately trying
the bottom out my 22 elastic (a rare occurrence). A longer fight and
this time the scales went round to 13lb 8oz. Nice.
In the next
30 minutes I had a few more bites, but I didn't connect with
anything. Then it was home time.
I was
admitting to 109lb of fish – a good day, but it could have been
better if I'd have kept the fish coming in the middle of the day.
The kid in
the next swim was up to over a hundred fish at this point and just as
I left you could see the first tell-tale signs that the carp were
moving in on the pellets. I hope he caught something off this line
after I left.
At the risk of sounding
a bit self-righteous, I actually got more pleasure today from sorting
out the kid on the next peg, than from anything I caught myself –
maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere.
Catch List
Common Carp : 10
Mirror Carp: 1
Roach: 7
Rudd: 3
Bream: 20
Total Weight: 109lb
