36 hours on Gardners Pool

My friend Steve and I have been members of Gardners Pool (which I often refer to as "GP") in Saul for 5 years now, but we'd never managed to do a night session there, until now!

A photo I took of GP a few months back, during sunnier weather!

The lake itself is about 5 acres in size, with a relatively flat bottom at around 3.5 to 5ft deep. Its a mostly gravel bottom without too much weed, but boasts some HUGE sets of lily pads. It also has its fair share of resident ducks, coots, moorhens, seagulls and of course the inevitable dreaded swan, which can test ones patience at times! Over the years all of these creatures have been given names by the two of us, mostly out of boredom on the less eventful days. We have such characters as Trev and Dave the mallards (Trev being the female, don't ask me why!) Rambo the swan, McDuck and his arch enemy Colonel Gadaffy duck, Duxedo (a black duck with a white chest), Kung Po and Szechuan the mandarin ducks, Moorhen freeman, Coot features and of course Cheryl vole (who, incidentally, is a field mouse). I realise this has nothing to do with fishing, but I've become so used to calling these creatures by their names that I thought it best to explain in advance just in case they crop up in the rest of this blog, so that you the readers aren't so perplexed when I refer to Rambo as being a pain in the arse!

Rambo will swim the entire length of the lake just to hiss at you!

Anyway, lets get to the session at hand! We eventually arrived Saturday morning at about 8:30am in the pouring rain after having to return home because some idiot (me) forgot their boots. The peg we had booked for the night was still occupied by the previous overnighter, so we unloaded a minimal amount of kit from the car, and decided to fish a peg known as the disabled peg until we could get on peg 4. I hadn't unpacked my baits, so all I had was a rig with 3 pieces of fake corn, and a rig with a sticky baits krill pop-up. I cast the pop-up rig to the edge of a big set of pads about 40 yards out, and I flicked the fake corn rig down the right hand margin (which I call carp corner) next to a smaller set of pads. It wasn't long, maybe 15 minutes and the corn rod was off! A short battle ensued with a small excursion into the set of pads, but I was the victor and a small common of about 6 or 7lb was in the net. I hadn't unpacked my camera as the weather was terrible so unfortunately there are no photos of the fish, or the one that Steve had not long after, also on a margin rod and around the same size. The rods were put back out, but nothing much else happened, other than the rain got heavier, and we got wetter and colder!

The rain cleared around dinner time and the chap on peg 4 had left, so the next hour or so was spent walking all our gear around the lake, as we couldn't get the barrow to fit in the car. An hour or 2 later and base camp was built, clothes were drying on the bivvies, dinner had been demolished and the rods were in the water. The margins on this side of the lake are a fair bit shallower than the opposite bank (where we started) so we opted to fish both rods out to the pads in the middle where it was deep enough to avoid being cleaned out by Rambo and his friends. Steve opted for the scattering of boilies baiting approach, where as I opted for a thin band of particles just off the pads. Neither approach really worked, the lake never fishes that great during daytime, but you can usually wrangle out a few fish but today the lake was pretty dead, maybe all the rain had made the water temps plummet and the fish had turned a bit lethargic, who knows, but for whatever reason the fish just didn't want to feed.

Starry nights means cold nights this time of year!

Day soon started to turn to night and usually the dusk period is where most of the action happens, so the rods were recast over the thin bed of bait with a fresh CCMoore live system snowman with a small bag of nutty stick mix on the left rod, and a chunk of red pepperami with a small bag of equinox pellets (strange combo I know, but it seems to work!) on the right rod. Dusk soon turned to night however without even a beep, and the clear skies meant it was getting pretty cold so we decided to go hide in our sleeping bags until the morning, rather confused as to why the lake was so dead.

I was awoken in the early hours by a few beeps of the right alarm, but after watching my motionless swinger from the warmth of my sleeping bag I decided it was probably just a liner and went back to sleep. About half an hour later I was awoken again by the same thing, and again decided it was a liner and went back to sleep... For all of about 10 minutes when the same thing happened again. I reluctantly left my cosy sleeping bag to go and investigate. The swinger was still, but I could see my line twitching ever so slightly where it entered the water, so I figured I'd managed to prick a roach or something similar while it investigated my hook bait. After reeling in and a short battle in the margins, turns out that the "roach" was another 7lb or so carp! It must have just picked up my bait and stayed still. Usually the runs are pretty violent as the fish take off towards the big sets of pads once they realise they've been had. I pretty much reeled it all the way to within a rod length of the bank just like you would a bream before it finally woke up and fought back. After checking the fish over it was healthy enough and was in pretty mint condition being one of the smaller newer fish, which appeared to further confirm my feeling that the fish seemed to have gone a bit lethargic from the sudden drop in water temperature, as until this weekend we'd still been having 20ºC+ daytime temps and barely a drop of rain all summer. Anyway the rod went back out on the spot with a fresh chuck of pepperami, but that was all the "action" that was had during the night.

One of the smaller residents of the pool

The following morning things looked to be on the up however, with a short bout of feeding from about 8am for an hour and a half or so, resulting in both of us catching a few small carp each. We still hadn't managed to find any of the lakes numerous double figure fish, but after a rather disappointing night the smaller ones were more than welcome. As is pretty typical with GP though, the fish turned off as soon as the sun started to climb higher in the sky, so we did the only thing any self respecting angler would do, and made a heap of bacon sandwiches and a cup of coffee while we made our plans for the rest of the day!

Now I had a backup plan if the carp fishing wasn't going to plan, and as the bigger fish seemed reluctant to come out to play, I decided to put my plan into action during the slower mid day period. I'd also brought along my now ancient feeder rod and 3 pints of maggot to have a crack at the bream in the lake which can go into double figures.

5lb before relieving itself all over my mat!

 I fished just a simple maggot feeder rig over the same bed of bait I'd used for my carp fishing (and topped up after the morning feeding spell). I got bites almost instantly and caught plenty of skimmers and the odd rudd, but the bigger specimens were eluding me. I decided to try something a bit different, and added a healthy splash of tiger nut flavouring to my now half depleted tub of maggots to try and tempt one of the larger residents. Oddly this did actually seem to have a rather instantaneous effect, just not entirely the one I was looking for! After flavouring, I found I caught pretty much only Rudd, it looked like the bream didn't agree with my decision at all! The rudd weren't too bad a size though at around 8-12oz, and they were all in scale perfect condition so it was nice to see them doing so well as they seem to be slowly disappearing from lakes across the country. This lasted for about an hour or so, and I was starting to run low on maggots, when it appeared the bigger bream wanted to come and play after all! I caught a few in the 2-3lb mark in amongst the numerous rudd I was still catching, and then when I'd gotten to the point where I could see the bottom of my maggot tub and only had a few feeders worth left, I snagged this 5 pounder which was probably more like 4lb 12 after it had finished doing what can only be described as a torrent of wee during the photo taking! There may have been a whole shoal out there, maybe even containing some of the bigger ones, but the truth was I had no maggots left, so that was the end of my bream session and the carp rods went back out with big baits to avoid them (They just aren't any fun on carp gear).

The afternoon was now becoming early evening, and the task of packing everything down in time to be off the lake by 7pm when the gates are locked was at hand. Obviously this meant that the carp were going to wake up and have another feeding spell to hinder our progress, and Steve was the first to connect with a double of just under 13lb which was much more in the ballpark of what we'd been expecting to catch. I managed to lose another 7lb ish fish at the net, and then go on to lose another about 5 minutes later. I hadn't suffered a hook pull from a carp in ages, so I guess it had to catch up with me at some point, thankfully with smaller fish! With the gear almost all packed down my pepperami rod screamed off and I was into what felt like a better fish. I prayed to the fishing gods that I wouldn't suffer another hook pull, and what seemed like an age later I had the fish in the net. It had put up a good fight, and if I'm honest I thought it was going to be an upper double from the way it was plodding around the swim, but at just under 14lb it was still more than welcome, and a good finish to a tricky but enjoyable session...

A typical GP common at just under 14lb.