I finished off the last piece saying that I was looking forward to a week down in Kent to do some carp fishing with my mate Ian Hardman on a small day-ticket venue called Strawberry Fields. As we’re good friends, and both Nash consultants, we usually manage to organize the odd day’s fishing together and usually arrange to both attend a couple of the same Nash Roadshow weekend events, so we can enjoy a bit of a social while still getting on with our promotional duties. Last year we managed to do a bit of carp fishing on one of the waters at Todber Manor in between a roadshow on the Isle of Wight and one at Todber itself. Our session was really relaxing and good fun and produced plenty of fish, but the water didn’t really contain anything very big and it wasn’t a venue of our own choosing. This year Ian really fancied a bit of a carp fishing holiday where we could choose our own venue, have a proper social and potentially fish for something significant size wise.
If we were going to commit time to a week’s carp fishing holiday, then I wanted to be fishing a water that had the potential of a PB for me, which really meant that we needed to be looking at waters that had produced carp of 50lb or more. Obviously there aren’t too many day ticket type venues in the UK with 50lb carp available but I drew up a shortlist of waters I’d heard about and as Ian had volunteered to drive (and we needed his ‘people carrier’ to take both sets of kit and bait for a week’s fishing), I left the final choice of venue up to him. So soon after Ian had decided on the venue I was on the phone to Len, the owner and manager of the fishery, to enquire about available dates etc. and a week running into the first few days in May was booked in.
I’d never set eyes on Strawberry Fields before and as it’s impossible not to try and attempt to visualize what the water might look like before you actually see it the reality was a little different to what I’d had in mind. Len had told us that the venue was only small, but after spending some time bream fishing on a pit of nearly 200 acres prior to our trip south, the 1.25 acres still took some getting used to, as it looked tiny at first. It’s a pretty looking water though, surrounded by mature trees and tucked away in the middle of the Kent countryside, and with plenty of signs of carp activity it didn’t take long to develop a certain appeal.
The water is roughly triangular in shape, probably not more than 70 yards across at the widest point on the blunt end and with only six swims in total; three down one side, including the ‘Shallows’ down towards the thin pointed end of the triangle, with two swims on the other side and a further swim, known as ‘The Bailiff’s Swim’, situated roughly halfway down the blunt end of the triangle.
Two swims were already occupied on our arrival, ‘The Bailiff’s Swim’ and ‘The Gravels’, which was one of the two swims on the ‘sunny’ side of the water, up near the wide end. This meant that we had a choice of four swims between us for our first night, but with ‘The Gravels’ becoming free the following morning we had a chance to move then if we wanted.
After a couple of slow laps Ian really fancied the swim called ‘No Name’, which was the other swim on the ’sunny side’, that also featured a large overhanging tree between it and ‘The Gravels’. The tree had lots of branches going through the water and provided an obvious safe haven for the carp, especially as fishing too tight to the branches was strictly against the rules. However after another couple of laps I was still uncertain about my swim choice. I quite fancied the isolation offered by ‘The Shallows’ down at the far end, especially as the only other swim that could really interfere with the swim’s boundaries would be the swim that Ian was moving into and we could control what went on at the end of the venue in terms of swim disturbance, baiting levels etc. between us.
However I was also concerned that as the venue was relatively shallow anyway, with a maximum depth of around 6ft or so, the real shallow end might be a bit too shallow and unattractive for the carp, as the weather was due to turn much cooler, especially at night.
The other free swim which took my fancy was one known as ‘The Fridge’ on the south east bank towards the wider end of the lake. This had relatively deeper water and also some signs of fish activity. I was guessing that the carp would favour the deeper water, but the swim shared boundaries with other swims on the lake. While Ian got started with carting his mountain of gear round to his chosen swim I remained undecided and utilized my marker set-up to lead about and chart some depths in both swims. Eventually I decided to set up in ‘The Fridge’ and to stay there for the duration of the session unless something indicated that I’d got my initial choice horribly wrong.
Several of the larger residents, including the huge common called ‘Lee Jackson’s’ had been caught in the weeks prior to our session, with the big common weighing well over 54lb. Unfortunately this could also mean that the same fish were unlikely to trip up again during our visit. Amazingly as we’d just about completed all the setting up and rod/bait placement etc. in our respective swims, this trend continued as Carl, the guy fishing ‘The Gravels’, was suddenly into a fish as evening approached. As the fight continued it seemed as though he was probably into one of the better ones and once it was safely netted Carl’s air punch and shout of “Get in!” appeared to confirm it. The fish was soon identified as ‘Two Tone’, the water’s largest mirror carp and Ian and I were invited round to help with the weighing and photography.
Carl was clearly delighted when the scales spun round to 48lb 8oz and I was pleased to help out when both Carl and Len asked if I’d deal with taking the subsequent trophy shots. It was obvious that Len and the regulars take really good care of the fish as the weighing, photography etc was all done with the welfare of the fish clearly a priority and a sore on one flank was treated with Len’s special antiseptic liquid. Obviously it was great to see one of the lake’s largest carp on the bank, but it did mean that this was another fish that was unlikely to be paying a subsequent visit to the bank during our session.
My initial plan was to stay in the same swim for the duration of our stay and to bait up two or three likely looking spots over the week to try and build up some real hotspots within the swim that the larger fish might start to associate with a constant supply of food and therefore might eventually lose caution and eventually make a mistake with a hookbait.
Use of the marker float had shown that the vast majority of the lake bed consisted of silt, with no weed, no real major changes in depth other than the drop off from the margins and no hard spots like gravel bars etc. The obvious feature was the margins and careful use of the marker float, slowly dragging the lead through various parts of the swim and feeling for any variations in resistance and movement, eventually identified a couple of close in spots that felt a little firmer than the majority of the surrounding lakebed.
A spot that had been recommended to me was down my right hand margin and underneath an overhanging branch. It was a spot that one of the larger commons had last been caught from and one favoured by many of the regulars. Dragging the marker underneath the branch itself revealed far too much in the way of old dead leaf deposits for my liking and it didn’t seem to me to be a spot that had been recently fed on. However a couple of yards further out felt firmer and didn’t seem to have any smelly old leaf deposit, so that became my right-hand spot and as it was easy catapult range for hemp etc. I decided to use a mainly particle approach on this rod.
Eventually I found a couple of small spots a little way round to my left close to a rhododendron bush growing in the edge that also felt a little firmer than the majority of the bottom, so this was carefully marked up on my left-hand rod. Again, because it was so close to the bank, any free bait for this area, even light stuff like chopped boilie and pellet, could be introduced either by hand or by catapult if the breeze got up. My third rod was going to be something of an ‘all or nothing’ type approach. I’d guessed that with the water being so small, the majority of anglers would take a cautious attitude to baiting up and would be unlikely to bait heavily with boilies, especially out in the more open water, with this in mind I gambled on a heavy boilie only approach and once a patch or two of firmer bottom had been located the marker float was popped up, the main line on the middle rod marked with pole elastic at the required range and four kilos of 15mm boilies dispatched to the surrounding area via catapult.
The first night passed quite quietly apart from a couple of small liners. The most noticeable thing was the sharp drop in the overnight temperature, falling away to just a couple of degrees above freezing. Personally I was nice and snug in my bivvy but I doubt that the fish were that impressed and it was noticeable that signs of activity at first light, and all the way through the early morning period, were virtually non existent.
The reason that my particular swim was called ‘The Fridge’ also became clear the first morning as the bivvy remained in shadow for most of the morning and didn’t really receive any amount of direct sunshine until much later in the day.
The lack of feeding activity in the cold mornings soon became something of a pattern and the water didn’t really start to show significant signs of proper feeding activity until much later in the day. There were usually some fish to be seen up in the water once it was light enough to see properly, cruising about very slowly and showing very little interest in anything in particular. There were a handful of ghostie-type grass carp in the water, which nearly always seemed to like drifting about near the surface and were very easy to spot even in the colored water. These grassies usually had a few other carp hanging about with them but holding station lower in the water, making them more difficult to see. Indications of proper feeding activity usually started sometime around mid-afternoon with a slow but definite increase in feeding activity building up through the afternoon and evening period until the return of the colder temperatures once the sun disappeared behind the surrounding trees would signal a gradual decline in feeding signs.
The feeding activity itself was usually fairly easy to spot as the carp did plenty of bubbling in the silty bottom once they’d got an appetite. I’d never really fished a water before where the carp produced so much clearly defined bubbling as they rooted about on the bottom and it was incredibly interesting to watch. However the bubbling was also very frustrating to witness as time and time again it appeared to indicate an amazingly random feeding behavior without any sort of pattern or predictability to it at all.
Later on during our second day ‘The Gravels’ swim became free and after some deliberation Ian decided to move as it transpired that this particular swim had produced all of the fish that had come out over the proceeding weeks. I stuck with my initial plan of staying in the same swim hoping to build up some feeding confidence in my baited spots.
As the session progressed the weather pattern of sunny days and cold nights continued, usually with an early morning frost clearly evident and remaining visible for several hours in the areas that stayed in the shade. This also seemed to prompt the continuation of the timing of the feeding pattern, with very little activity during the cold nights and early mornings, but a gradual build up from early to mid-afternoon onwards, presumably coinciding with a rise in water temperature.
I continued to bait up the spot that I was fishing my middle rod to with plenty of boilies. After the initial first day introduction of four kilos, I catapulted in a further three kilos a day for the next three days. My presentation on this rod started out as a 15mm cork dust pop-up, fished so that it hopefully stood out quite blatantly from the mass of free offerings around it. Later in the session I started to experiment with a standard 15mm bottom bait, straight out of the bag so that it looked and behaved much like the boilies that I’d been introducing to the area over the session.
My right hand margin spot continued to see a decent helping of particle on a daily basis: mostly hemp, with a couple of handfuls of flavored sweetcorn, a handful of tiger nuts and a sprinkling of pellet to add to the overall attraction levels. The hookbait on this rod was varied between a smallish tiger nut critically balanced with a piece of cork and a piece of sweetcorn, again critically balanced on top of a piece of shaped yellow rig foam.
Later on in the session I substituted the sweetcorn and some of the hemp and tigers for maggots, as I’d taken several pints with me and also experimented with some additional swapping about with the hookbait to try and stimulate a pick up. The area covered by the left-hand rod was baited much more cautiously over the duration of the session, usually with just a couple of handfuls of chopped boilie and some pellets spread over an area the size of a small dining table, with a little trail of bait between the edge of the margin and the main baited area.
On the afternoon of the second day, Dave the bailiff took a nicely scaled carp that looked to be around upper doubles from the margins of his swim that he informed me had been receiving a regular if somewhat random baiting over a long period of time. This was certainly a spot that the fish liked to feed on, as several times over the week I was able to observe some additional clouding up in this area even in the murky water that only had visibility of only a few inches. ]
For one night when ‘The Bailiff’s Swim’ wasn’t occupied I did move my right-hand bait over to fish the corner of the lake near to this regular baited spot. Unfortunately the following day when I reeled it in there was a horrible black smelly leaf impaled on the hook and I think I’d possibly tried to be a little bit too cleaver for my own good and had positioned the hookbait too tight to the corner, whereas I might have been better off positioning it on the regularly baited spot that was a little easier to reach and that I already knew was a spot the fish were willing to feed on.
Elsewhere on the lake the fish continued to indicate what appeared to be a completely random choice of feeding spots with a seeming indifference to the areas that I was introducing bait on and preferring to bubble up just here and there for a few seconds before doing the same on different areas a few minutes later. This was all frustrating, head-scratching stuff at first, but I eventually concluded that most of the lake bed acted as one giant bloodworm bed for the carp and that with the poor weather conditions leading to a lack of any real sustained feeding, the carp could simply dip down and browse the bottom for a sufficient snack of bloodworm to satisfy their needs whenever they fancied. Using a nobbly lead on the marker set-up nearly always resulted in a bloodworm or two draped over the lead or swivel somewhere, so there was obviously no shortage of them residing in the silt deposits. Big beds of bait, that may have indicated a potential danger zone to the fish, could be ignored while the conditions remained poor with insufficient stimulus for a major feeding spell.
The lake remained pretty busy and Ian and I continued to fish hard throughout our session, though we did treat ourselves to a nice lunchtime meal at a local pub mid-way through and ensured that we also enjoyed a bit of a social in each other’s swims at least once each day. The fishing however remained slow going, but eventually on the afternoon of day five my left-hand rod suddenly indicated a run and after a bit of scampering about around the swim a pretty little carp found itself taking a rest in the landing net.
I knew from early on during the fight that it wasn’t going to be one of the Strawberry Fields’ monsters; the scaly mirror indicating 17lb 8oz on the scales. It might not have been huge but I was very thankful for it all the same and had rescued a potential ‘blank’… phew! The successful bait had been a 10mm dumbbell-shaped pop-up critically balanced with a no.4 shot pinched onto the hair directly underneath the bait. The idea being to try and present the bait resting on\in the silt in the same zone as the free offerings.
Ian also managed to save a blank while experimenting with lobworm on the hook. Unfortunately he didn’t manage to hook any carp, but he did take a handful of nice perch over the 2lb mark.
Unfortunately our week was over far too quickly and it was time to pack up and head for home. We’d both thoroughly enjoyed our session and despite the fishing being somewhat frustrating at times, I think we could have both quite easily have stayed on for another week if we’d had the opportunity. With the poor conditions they’d only been a couple of fish out during our session but I can easily imagine that the venue could be a rather exciting place to be when the carp are well on the feed and the chances of a very big fish are a real possibility. Perhaps given the opportunity we’ll take a trip back sometime.
With the summer allegedly just around the corner (though it seemed more like late February on my last session) and my beam campaign soon to be concluded until either the autumn, or perhaps spring next year depending on now I feel, it would be nice to get a bite on the big pit before turning attention to some different species. I’ll not be holding my breath… but whatever happens I’ll give you an update next month.
Until next time… happy fishing!
