Anglers Paradise 2017 - Session 2

Session 2 - Octopussy Specimen Carp Lake

After nipping into Holsworthy for the weeks shopping (which seemed to consist entirely of pizzas!) and having a glass of wine or 2 with Zyg, Steve and I planned to try for some cats on Octopussy as in previous years, and as the weather was now well and truly scorchio it seemed like a good choice. I decided to go have a quick recon mission down to the lake while the others attempted to fit 20 pizzas in the fridge, and it turned out almost every peg was already taken! Upon returning to the villa and breaking the bad news, we formulated a new plan to fish the specimen carp lake instead, as main was out of action for the day for the 5C's syndicate.

My peg on the Specimen Carp lake

After a quick look at the lake, Steve opted to fish the ramp swim as usual, as there were a number of fish in the area. Despite seeing plenty of fish there every year, I never do any good there so decided to look else where. Many of the fish were held up in the weeds and pads around the back of the lake towards the koi lake, a couple were circling in open water in tadpoles peg (I have no idea what the peg is really called, it just always seems to be the peg tadpole gets caught from) which is where I usually end up fishing (and do no good!) so I resisted the urge to fish there too! In the end I opted for a peg on the far bank. I did see a decent mirror in the margins, but I'd never fished the far bank before, and the lake had repeatedly kicked my arse year on year so I thought I'd try somewhere different to previous years. 

I had a decent sized island bay out in front of me, and the island corner on my right. I decided to fish my right rod just off a small set of pads on the corner of the island, as I knew the fish took that route when swimming round the lake. My left rod I decided to put right at the back left of the bay under an overhanging tree, with the intent of moving it to the margins when the sun had set. I put about 40 to 50 boilies over each spot, and cast out my trusty wafter rigs fitted with a medium bag of 3mm betaine green pellet. Naturally, as soon as I got my rods out exactly where I wanted them, Steve phones me up asking for a photo of a grass carp he'd just caught, so in come the rods and off I trotted with my camera gear.

Steve with his new PB grass carp

It was worth it just to watch it beat Steve up on the bank, as grassies often misbehave when out the water, but it was a pretty nice fish too, and a new PB for Steve! My memory is a bit hazy but I think it was 16lb something. I returned to my peg and put the rods back out on the spots again, and almost instantly the left hand rod was away, and shortly after I had a small barrel shaped carp in the net, which looked like it should only have weighed a pound or 2, but was probably closer to 3 or 4 as it looked like it had indeed eaten all the pies! This proved to be a recurring theme for the left hand rod for the next few casts, but with all of the other fish dropping off on the way in. I didn't want to catch pasties all day and night, so I decided to ditch the pva bag of pellet on the left hand rod and fired out about half a kilo of boilies, which seemed to do the trick as the bites died off. As the evening was getting on I decided to put another 40 baits or so over the right rod too just to make sure I had some freebies out for the night ahead.

26lb 6oz from the specimen carp lake

I was just settling down for the night at around quarter to midnight when my right hand rod tore off! Fully expecting another pasty I casually lifted into the fish, at which point to my surprise the rod hooped over and the spool continued to spin after disengaging the baitrunner. It didn't take long to get the fish to the bank, but once there it absolutely refused to come up off the bottom, so I had a feeling I'd snagged a decent fish. Eventually after about 10 minutes of the fish plodding around under the rod tip it finally came up off the bottom and I swiftly got it in the net. It looked a decent fish and felt even better when lifting it out, surely I'd won my first bottle of the week! I quickly unhooked it and weighed it in at 26lb 6oz, before briefly resting it up in the margins while I got my camera gear sorted for the photos. I didn't want to wake sleeping beauty and drag him round the lake in the dark for anything other than a PB so decided to try for a self take. Not the best photo in the world but it'll have to do!

The milky way, complete with plane

The excitement had woken me up again, and I wasn't going back to sleep any time soon so I decided to have a crack at capturing the milky way with the camera. Being close to the longest day of the year it wasn't exactly the best of times for such an image as it never really got completely dark, but I did sort of manage to capture a part of it, complete with passing plane!

Starting to feel tired again about half an hour later, I got back into bed for the night, and no sooner had I shut my eyes, the right rod was off again! I jumped back out the bivvy and hit into another good fish. This one seemed a bit more lively and was taking a fair bit of line. I wasn't too worried though as it felt like it was heading down towards the pagoda through the open water. That was until I noticed I was starting to put more and more side strain on it to the left, at which point I realised it was nowhere near the pagoda and was actually somewhere over by the monk, ahh bugger! Despite my complete lack of sense of direction, I carefully turned the fish and soon had it under control under the rod tip, at which point it did a rather convincing impression of the first fish and refused to come off the bottom. It did eventually end up in the net however, and was a lovely linear at 25lb 14oz. 

Tadpole??? 25lb 14oz from the specimen carp lake

Now, I didn't think much of it at the time due to it's weight, but since coming back home I've noticed this fish has an uncanny resemblance to the infamous Tadpole, who usually graces the bank in the low 30's so I've included a photo of tadpole from the AP website for comparison, what do you think?

Tadpole from a few years ago at 29lb, closest angle I could find to my photo for comparison.

That was pretty much the end of the action from session 2, apart from the pasties annihilating my left hand rod again as soon as daylight started to return in the early hours of Sunday morning, which resulted in me getting virtually no sleep whatsoever! Still I couldn't complain, I'd caught 2 good fish, and won 2 bottles on my first night of the holiday proper, and finally broken my 7 year streak of terrible luck on the specimen carp lake during the summer.