ROB HUGHES’ DIARY
Rob gives an insight into his latest underwater adventures and how hungry day-ticket carp respond to noise
IT’S BEEN a great mixed grill of angling this month with some amazing adventures and quite a lot of diving too. In fact, just last week I spent three days underwater looking at all manner of things, including how much food carp can eat at one sitting, bait spread and hookbait positioning.
One of the highlights of the month for me has been making a new Understanding Underwater film, where I look at how PVA and various different versions of it behave, when to use it and what’s best in different situations. It’s a real eye-opener and will undoubtedly help anglers catch more fish for sure. We also have a look at another major tripwire in carp fishing – how to get around weed. It’s coming together nicely and the A-Z of Underwater is now well underway.
I also managed a session out with my Dynamite/Carp Spirit teammate Ian Russell for our Day Ticket Travels series, but to be honest, we really struggled finding somewhere to go. So many day-ticket lakes are now booking only, and with everything being rammed, we simply couldn’t get on anywhere at the time that we had available. We decided to go for a day-only fishery and have a bit of a smash-up so we headed up to Northamptonshire to Boddington, a match venue that has a lot of reasonable carp in. Arriving ‘on the off chance’ we were met with four matches and a full lake, so had to divert to nearby Clattercote. I didn’t know anything about it, so it really was ‘on the hoof.’
Heading to the ‘banker area’ according to a bloke who knew the venue, things did not start well. After an hour without a sign of a fish and a worried camera crew, we used our heads instead and found the fish, rather than just going for the known area. The long and short of it was that the buzzers sang a lot after we had made the change. We were into fish within 15 minutes of the move.
Small mesh bags with a lick of flavour did the trick for both of us, but the key to catching consistently was regularly pinging individual boilies over the spot. I’ve found that fish in waters like this are sound feeders, and the regular plop of single baits going in really got them going. It’s well worth trying if you are on a high stock venue, but use literally one at a time and be consistent. We tried it with clumps, but the singles did the trick so much quicker.
As far as my own personal fishing is concerned, I’d love to tell you that it’s been amazing and that I caught loads of
Ready-tied choddies, either as choddies or reverse combis combined with pinks, have caught me the most fish this month.
carp. Sadly, this month I can’t. It’s been a real hit and miss month, partly I feel as a result of the weather and atmospheric conditions, but the main thing for me has been timing. By that I mean the times of day that the carp have been getting caught. Speaking to a few pals, we’ve noticed that on the lakes we’re fishing, the carp have been feeding in the daytime more than at night. It’s been noticeable that quite a few ‘head-turner’ carp have been coming out between 9am and 4pm – times which I associate with feeding spells in the winter, but not necessarily in the summer. For me, traditionally, last light and first light are the ones in the warmer months but this year it’s not been the case for me.
Most of my personal carp fishing tends to be overnighters and short sessions between jobs. It’s been immensely frustrating having to pull off just before bite time. Or, worse still, sitting through a blank only to see reports of fish coming in while I’m at work. I’m suffering from ‘fear of missing out’, and seeing the carp coming out when I have no chance of catching them is a frustrating challenge to say the least.
The water is definitely cooling down now, though, as are air temperatures, and early mornings require a jacket and nights a sleeping bag cover. I’ve always found that the back end of summer and into autumn can be a hit-and-miss time of year anyway. But the hits are worth it, as they can be really big ones.