22 February 2008

"Mild Conditions"


This was a nice surprise these fish were taken during the Month of October 2007!!

On a lake about a mile from where I live, considering the awful weather we had during last year, on this particular day the weather was kind to us.


It is a comparatively small lake and from a previous visit I knew there were more fish to be caught, the last time my friend John and I fished it, we fished towards a small Island in more or less the same conditions.
After not Having caught anything of note on our last visit, this time before we started to set up. I decided to set my pole up at 11mtrs, with a float and plummet on, and take a stroll around the lake just to find out where the deepest part was.

After returning from my trek I explained to my mate John that the lake appeared to be pretty much uniform in depth, and there seemed little point in walking to far to find a comfortable area to fish.

Many years ago it was not to difficult to find a likely spot to fish, a good yard stick was the bank side vegetation, which was usually trampled down and worn out. But these days like this fishery, there are the uniformed duck boards or pallets to place your box on.


This lake had two shelves and dropped off to about 7ft deep at approximately 11mtrs out from the bank side on most of the pegs. We decided to fish were we stood, so I set up a 1-50Gram pole float with an Olivette approximately 21 inches from the hook and two tiny no 10 micro shot droppers, the first one 6inches from the hook and another one at approximately 4inches from the other.

I always prefer to keep things as simple as possible and as a rule try not to clutter things up on my rigs, the simpler the better! both of us had quite a respectable catch and being in October! a very unusual one at that, it just goes to show that contrary to popular belief Crucian carp will feed in winter .

It was as important as always when fishing for Crucians, to dot your float down to as close to the surface of the water as is visibly possible, because they can give you the most delicate of bites.

More often than not they will pick your bait up from the bottom of the lake, and if you have plumbed and set the float to the correct depth, this results in a lifting of the float. You can bet your life on it when this happens they are yours if you time it properly.

We caught most of these fish using single and double red maggots, on size 20 hooks and on an occasional piece of sweet corn, fished over a bed of chopped worm and casters. For some unknown reason they would not take a worm?

We have had a very poor time recently due to the weather once again, but never the less I will keep you posted when we have another catch to remember !! so until next
October tight lines !!!