Improve Your Coarse Fishing (UK)
How to tackle new lakes – Joe Oakes
Brand new lakes are a mystery but there’s plenty you can do to catch their fresh stock, says Joe Oakes
THE first thing you will do before visiting a fishery for the first time is to search for information on how to get bites. You might speak to the owners or a local tackle shop, tap into the brains of others anglers on the Internet or read the form guides and match results in Angling Times. But what if absolutely no information was available and you had to go blind? That may sound like a highly unlikely scenario but if you are going to wet a line on a brand new water that’s only just opened then you’re likely to know just as much as anyone else – and that’s not much! But Middy-backed Joe Oakes is convinced you can piece together a plan by analysing several factors to make sure you get it right and bag up at the first time of asking. “Lots of fisheries have been working hard to improve during winter and for many that has involved creating new lakes,” explained Joe. “Working out how to fish these waters and get bites from the off can be tricky but there are several things you can take note of to help you get the big decisions right.”
Weather analysis
When you turn up at a brand new lake you will be greeted by dozens of pegs that have only been fished a handful of times – if that. As with every water, some pegs will be more productive than others and Joe believes one big factor can help you select a swim that is bound to hold a big shoal of fish. “If there is a warm wind blowing then you can guarantee that the fish will be sat at the end of the lake that it is pushing towards. This is because the wind takes any natural food with it and the shoals will follow that for a feast.” If it is flat calm then it’s best to walk around the venue and do two things. The first is to look for signs of where the fish are crashing out and the second is to look at the colour of the water. “Some areas of the lake may have more coloured water and these spots are where you need to fish because they are where the carp have been burying their heads into the bottom, disturbing the mud and making the water a chocolatey colour.”
Pellets, pellets and pellets
Before any fish are introduced into their new habitat they will be fed to grow them and keep them healthy. Anglers will introduce a wide range of baits when they are fishing but fishery owners tend to rely on one source of food to keep their stocks in tip top condition. “Any new fish that go into a lake will have been fed on pellets. This is why they are the only bait I will use. There freshly stocked carp aren’t used to corn or maggots and although you might fluke a few fish using them, you won’t achieve the catch you are hoping for as the fish don’t associate such morsels with food just yet.” Joe will start any session cupping in a dozen 4mm pellets. Theses have been bought from the fishery so they are the exactly the same flavour to what the fish have been fed on while in stock ponds. If that doesn’t work he will start to catapult the bait to try and attract the fish with the added noise. Using a hookbait that matches the loose feed can work but using a slightly different pellet with added flavour and colour such as a Dynamite Baits Swim Stim White Amino can be even more deadly at times in coloured water.
Shearsby shoals
Leicestershire’s Shearsby Valley Lakes is just one of the many fisheries that has undergone major changes in recent months and is a place that Joe has targeted on dozens of occasions. The 50-peg Alder Lake was completely transformed and has now been split into two 18peg waters called Hurricane and Tornado. Finding 7ft of water on the 9m line, Joe tapped in a few pellets and repeated the process several times over the next 15 minutes before he got his first bite of the day from a hard-fighting carp. That proved to be a loner so out came the catapult and the pellets soon pulled the fish in. “I’ve ended up with well over 50lb of carp today and I have had to make my decisions without any help from other anglers. But by reading the conditions and working out how the fish like to feed I have kept the bites coming all day,” he stated.