Towards the end of my June diary piece I mentioned that I was considering doing some fishing on a complex of pits that I hadn’t fished for a while; namely Bluebell Fisheries at Tansor near Peterborough.
A while back Bluebell was voted the most popular carp fishery in the country due to both the size and diversity of the carp fishing that the complex of pits (and the stretch of river) has to offer. But it is also the other species of fish that grow to specimen sizes that interest me; with huge catfish and pike, bream and tench into double figures and a host of other species having been caught from the complex at various times. In fact I was fishing the pits in the winter for big pike and during the warmer months for bream and perch for a couple of years prior to Tony Bridgefoot buying the venue and opening it as Bluebell Fisheries back in 1994. So my association with the venue, in some way or another, has been going on for over 20 years, although I’ve had some lengthy periods of absence in that time.
Prior to going back just recently, my last trip had been a few years ago with my mate Ian to try and catch him his first catfish. Well before then I’d had a couple of periods when I had concentrated quite seriously on the carp in Kingfisher Lake, with the huge common known as ‘Benson’ being the main object of my desire. I never did catch Benson before he died, although I did have the rather weird experience of netting him in the middle of the night after he’d got caught up on one of my lines due to trailing around a rig on a long length of broken off braided main line.
I never even brought Benson onto the bank that night, I simply removed the offending rig from his mouth while he was still supported in the margins in my landing net then, after a couple of minutes’ rest for both of us, while I stared at his very impressive bulk in the light from my head-torch I just sunk the net under him and watched him slowly waddle off into the darkness. I did catch plenty of the other good carp in Kingfisher though, and some of them are still about and now the largest and most desirable residents of the lake.
For my latest re-introduction to the fishery I couldn’t resist making Kingfisher the first lake I fished as I have so many memories of the place and the characters that fished it. So I treated myself to a bit of a nostalgia session in one of the swims along my favorite bank. As it transpired there wasn’t a big carp to grace my landing net and welcome me back, but I did have a decent bream pick up a doctored 10mm boilie presented on one of my favored little pop-up rigs.
It wasn’t too long before I was back on Bluebell again, but this time I headed off to Swan Lake to have a go for the catfish. I’d only fished for the catfish in Swan a couple of times in the past, but on one of those occasions had ended up with a 44lb fish on a quick midweek overnight session. Since then the catfish had grown considerably and there was now a realistic chance of one or two of the biggest going over the 100lb mark!
My PB catfish is a lovely fish from Jones’ Pit, one of the ex-Cemex venues, at a weight of 62lb 5oz. With Jones’s Pit being one of the old, established, traditional catfish venues and my 62.05 fish likely to be a very special UK catfish that had been born and bred in the venue, it’s not a PB that I’m not in any particular hurry to beat. However with the chance of doing battle with a Swan Lake catfish of over 100lb, my anticipation dial still swung right round to ten!
Once they’d become established, it seemed that the Swan Lake catfish had done a pretty good job of clearing up the majority of the more available smaller fish in the lake and had then figured out that eating the freely available boilies and pellets that were being launched into the lake on a regular basis by the carp anglers was a pretty convenient way of keeping the hunger pangs at bay. My 44lb fish a few years back had been caught on large glugged halibut pellet and I was going to use similar tactics this time around, but on a slightly larger scale.
Hookbaits this time were a combination of a Dynamite Baits’ 30mm halibut pellet special hookbait, with a 20mm monster crab pop-up, tipped off with a piece of fluorescent plastic corn. Everything having had a good soaking in a 50:50 mixture of Dynamite’s halibut oil bait soak and Nashbait’s crustacean extract prior to the trip. It might all sound a bit over the top, but it all looks pretty neat once threaded onto a large hair rig (to me anyway) and the large hookbait helps to prevent interference from any nuisance species like small bream, tench or carp that might otherwise compromise the presentation. The hookbaits were also fished over separate spots spodded with a selection of glugged boilies, pellets and chopped up luncheon meat, so the catfish had plenty to simulate their sense of smell and to home in on.
The first night of the session was all very quiet, but early afternoon the following day I was suddenly ‘away’ on my right-hand rod. My catfish gear is pretty sturdy and uncompromising, with Nash Deliverance spod rods, tough big pit type reels and 18lb mono all part of the set-up. However a decent catfish can still put up a very good account of itself against this sort of equipment.
This, however, didn’t turn out to be the most protracted fight I’ve ever had with a catfish, but there was still a reasonable amount of pulling and tugging from both ends before a nice fish was wallowing around in the margins. Fortunately at that moment one of the carp fisherman having a bit of a scout round happened to wander past the swim and was able to lend a hand with the landing and subsequent, weighing and photographs. At 52lb 4oz it was probably one of the smaller cats residing in the lake, but I was well happy! There were no further catfish to be had on the session, but plenty of the smaller carp were to be seen in the margins and the tench were really getting into a full-on spawning situation, so there was plenty to look at.
My next session was on another of the lakes at Bluebell, this time on Bluebell Lake itself. My main target was eels and I had four nights at my disposal, but as I had agreed with Tony the owner at Bluebell to try and get a few photos of a range of species for the fishery web site I was also going to have a go for the bream and tench. The last time I’d really had a serious go on Bluebell Lake had been many years ago, but the last couple of times had been to target the eel population and with fish to just over 4lb for my efforts I reckoned that I might be in with a chance of a decent fish if I could get the location and timing right.
As it happened, trying to present either lobworm or maggot hookbaits for the eels at night on the bottom, even during the hours of proper darkness, was not viable due to the almost constant attention of small stuff. Bluebell teems with rudd of all sizes and these, along with the small perch, roach and small carp, made it pretty much impossible to keep an intact hookbait out for the eels with a standard bottom style presentation.
After a bit of experimentation an off the bottom presentation with a CD rig did enable a lobworm hookbait to survive the attentions of the nuisance species, but unfortunately it didn’t impress any eels either.
Fortunately my plans to catch some of the other fish did come up with the goods. Fishing two rods on the method with artificial sweetcorn or 10mm Source boilies over a reasonably large bed of spod made up of a mixture of Dynamite hemp, Swim Stim pellet, scopex flavored corn and whole and crushed 10mm Source boilies produced loads of bream ranging in weight from about 4lb up to just over 9lb. In fact over the course of the session 51 bream came to the net. Most of the bites came either in the evening or early morning periods, with the warm middle day periods and the middle of the night being relatively quiet. It became quite obvious that the bream would move over the feed in separate shoals, as they nearly always came in batches of a similar weight.
During the day I swapped the eel rod for a rod fishing the shallow margins, with the lake’s tench in mind. Initially I’d planned to start off with a ‘little and often’ baiting up of maggot, with a little bolt rig and a couple of maggots on a short hooklink. However the rudd soon started to mass up over the baited area and eventually made short work of any maggots introduced, so a different strategy had to be worked out. Hemp lasted longer as a mass loosefeed and with a sprinkling of either sweetcorn or 10mm boilies over the top, and as hookbait, it became possible to keep the rudd at bay and provided enough time for something larger to take the hookbait.
It was fascinating fishing, as with the aid of Polaroid sunglasses I could keep an eye on the baited area, even picking out the hookbait itself on occasions. This meant that I could watch the reactions of the fish and sometimes even watch them taking the hookbait.
Unfortunately few of the lake’s tench made an appearance in the swim and I only caught one over the duration of the session; a fish of 5lb plus. Plenty of the smaller, recently introduced carp showed up though and I ended up catching nearly 40 carp, but only a couple of them into double figures. Some of these recent stockies are gorgeously heavily scaled fish and I the fish I had included a couple of these little beauties. They’ll be much sought after once they’ve grown on a bit.
By now I’d really gotten the bug for fishing around on a few different waters, so decided that I’d fish Mallard Lake on my next trip.
Mallard is Bluebell’s largest and most recent addition to the waters available on the complex and has been heavily stocked with carp to help create a water where a few runs over the course of a session should be possible if location is right and a bit of effort put in. In addition to the carp, which can go to 30lb plus, there are some nice tench and a few very big bream, the largest of which has been recorded at over 18lb. As usual it was the carp that attracted almost all of the anglers who fished Mallard, but my main target for the session would be the rarely caught bream, as I wanted to see one of the big ones for myself. I found it difficult to obtain any information about the potential weights of the tench that had been caught from the venue, so it seemed like these weren’t caught all that often either.
I’d had never fished Mallard Lake in the past, so with little information on past catches to work on I decided to fish a swim that was due to be on the end of the wind over the next few days according to the weather forecast, it also gave access to a nice area of open water. With the forecast set for warm sunny days the fact that I could bivvy up under the shade of some nice overhanding trees in my lovely secluded swim was a bit of a bonus.
Once again my main target area was a weed free spot at about 40 yards or so, baited up via spod with a nice mixture of various particle-sized goodies. Two separate hookbaits were cast over the area, with balanced scopex flavored corn on one rod and the ever faithful 10mm Source boilie on the other. A little method type groundbait with lots of molasses liquid used to mix it up was squeezed around the lead on each cast to add extra attraction to the immediate area of the hookbaits. A third rod was used to present a bait just on the slope of the marginal shelf, which was heavily weeded in places, but a couple of clearer gaps in only 2ft of water looked just right for presenting a bait for the tench.
Unfortunately the weather forecast was only partially correct, as while it was hot and sunny for most of the session, the wind never really swung round to blow directly into the swim apart from one amazing night when there was an extended stormy period with loads of spectacular thunder and lightning that lasted from early evening right the way through to the following morning.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find any bream, but a number of double figure carp appeared to enjoy munching over the spodded area, with most of the bites coming during the morning or evening periods. I also had several tench on the close in rod on the marginal shelf, especially once I’d worked out that they weren’t all that keen on a bright little pop-up and seemed to prefer a 10mm bottom bait cut in half and presented ‘butterfly’ style on the hair with a little PVA mesh bag of broken boilies nicked onto the hook for each cast. The tench I caught on this session were all very similar; all males around the 4.5 to 5lb mark. However one of the tench I saw roll close in looked much larger!
I’d just waded out a few yards to net a tench as the swim was very shallow close in and as I turned to make my way back to the shoreline a really big tench performed one of those extremely lazy type rolls that seem to last forever, just past the drop off area over to the right of the swim. It was clearly a very nice fish and looked as though it could have been twice the weight of the (approximately 5lb) fish that I’d just netted. As soon as I’d got the tench I’d just landed safely unhooked and returned I rigged up another rod to present a bait in the area that the big tench had rolled in. Unfortunately the additional rod never produced a bite for the remainder of the session…
None of the 20 or so carp I ended up catching from Mallard during the session were particularly big, as they were all doubles between about 12 and 18lb. Most were commons, which I was ever so slightly annoyed about as some of the fish that had been stocked over the years were nicely scaled mirrors and I’d seen some lovely looking fish in the water as I’d had a good look round each day. However, on the last morning I was well rewarded with a really gorgeous fully-scaled mirror that went 2oz shy of 16lb, but must rate as one of the most beautiful carp that I’ve ever caught. I would love to make its re-acquaintance in the future when it weighs over 30lb!
I’m really enjoying fishing around a number of the different waters on the Bluebell complex and would like to try a session on Sandmartin Lake and possibly have a go on the river if I can manage to find the time at some point in the future, so that I’ve tried all of the different waters at least once this year. However I’m also keen to try and catch another catfish or two from Swan Lake and have at least one more go for the eels before the weather turns cooler. I’ve also got a Nash roadshow at Emperor Lakes down in Devon to fit in next weekend, so next month is clearly going to be another busy one full of interesting fishing opportunities.
Whatever happens I’ll let you know next time. Until then…happy fishing!
