Thursday …
Lakewood Carp Syndicate North Lincs
A lovely, intimate, tree lined lake with a good head of hard fighting mirrors and commons.
Conditions were good, warm, mostly sunny with just patches of cloud.
Brian Skoyles met up with one of the syndicate organisers Ivan Washington in advance of everyone else arriving. We baited up a couple of likely looking areas and also fed some floaters to a group of fish sunning themselves in the weed. It didn’t take long for there to be signs of feeding fish both on the top and on the bottom. The only trouble was that everyone else was delayed as their shop visiting schedule was falling a bit behind …. All we could do was sit and watch lots of carp feeding.
It didn’t matter though and as everyone arrived the fish were still feeding. What followed was a most enjoyable few hours of mostly surface fishing with everyone catching, topped by a twenty pounder to Scott. Not sure if was the intention but we ended up staying well into evening and it was dusk as we headed down the lane for a rest before part two, which as it turned out was to be something completely different!
Friday …
Nottingham Piscatorial Society Gravel Pit, Newark on Trent
The weather forecast was for the day to be mostly dry with a strengthening wind, they were right on both counts, as it did stay dry and the wind certainly strengthened, but I don’t remember them talking about gale force!
Our venue for the Friday was a large open gravel pit near Newark on Trent owned and run by Nottingham Piscatorial Society. Assistant Secretary Kevin Stephenson was our host for the day and met me at 7-30 am to help get the swim organised.
Part of the planning was to experience contrasting style of carp fishing using a range of tackle and tactics, but we hadn’t planned to experience “the strengthening wind” which made casting and control tricky to say the least. The gravel pit we were fishing has a big head of hard fighting commons but they weren’t playing ball and the early part of the day was slow, but it gave us time to thoroughly examine the performance of a range of rods and reels particularly the marker and spod set-ups.
As the day progressed bites started to become more frequent, with several “one toners” that gave everyone chance to experience playing carp in open water despite the wind.
A big thank you to Ivan at the Lakewood Syndicate and Kevin at Notts Piscatorials, two very different carp waters, both providing superb hospitality and carp fishing, I think it’s fair to say we’d had a great time!
