‘The last 18 months have rarely seen me do more than 10-12 hours fishing at a time. Not through choice, as I’ll be honest, I love kicking back at first light with a coffee sitting behind some perfectly placed traps, but 98% of my angling over the last year and a half has been worknights in the UK, and even the European trips have taken a similar route, ending up on strict ‘days only’ venues and everything being predominantly short 10-12 hour days. A recent trip to northern Europe to explore some new ground saw myself and Mike Holly stuck in some unseasonably wild and wet, windy weather, and caught amidst spawning carp almost everywhere we went – whilst my April trip literally was timed to perfection, the late May trip couldn’t have really been much worse.
Not only did we get stuck in the weather, we also got stuck in a cycle that felt like groundhog day, seeing us fishing multiple venues and bouncing between legal day and night venues to make the most of our time. We looked at around 20 venues all in, and fished six over the course of eight nights, this plump common from a mad and incredibly beautiful ‘old world’ estate park lake being the biggest. A throwback to the 80’s, chasing fizzers around we managed a few, some spawned out cricket bats, and this plump lovely one the best. Being days only, we had packed up early from the night spot, barrowed the mile or so around a convoluted, serpentine shaped lake at first light, found a few fizzing giving the game away and had a couple before we’d even stopped and had a chance to make a coffee.
Little 2oz leads, long 25lb Dark Matter links with Size 4 Wide Gape X’s, fished multi Slip D style with a slow sinking hookbait comprising a 60/40 split of a Baitworks Creamino hard hooker and a prototype yellow one, cut cleanly to sit back to back. A tiny bag of just two 15mm crumbed baits and an underarm swing was all it needed. Lovely angling!’