Rob Shanks sent us this report on a lovely brace of winter thirties caught last week. It goes to show they are starting to wake up and Rob’s concentrated pre-baiting and close observations really paid off, top angling Rob!
I’d been steadily introducing a supply of bait into a couple of known winter spots for a few weeks, one particular area really took my fancy as it has a habit of producing a few of the lakes bigger fish at the back end of the winter most years. I’d managed a couple of short day sessions with no success but I’d also noticed that the lakes birdlife was quite actively searching for baits and had shown very little interest in the area I’d been baiting, having put in about 7kg over a 3 week period I knew it was very unlikely that they hadn’t stumbled across it so the carp had to be wiping it out, so with milder weather forecast I decided to do a quick 24hr session.
Tactic’s where kept simple, glugged up Sticky baits white chocolate pop up’s, fished on ESP chod rigs compromising of ESP leadcore, 25lb Stiff Filament and my old trusty size 5 Stiff Riggers, a good handful of 15mm Vortex boilies spread over 3 nice deep silty areas completed the traps. As soon as darkness fell I started get a lot of a liners and I was clear I had a lot of fish in the swim, an hour and half or so later I’d still not had a bite so I decide to top the areas up with another good handful of bait and retire to the bag for the night as the temperature was plummeting.
I was awoken at 1.30am by a twitchy take on my middle hand rod which after an epic battle turned out to be a repeat capture of a lovely old character fish which went 31.04. In the early hours of the morning I received another take on my right hand rod which turned out to be 33.08 common, I managed to get some awesome frosty shots of her in her winter coat. By the time I slipped her back the lake was 80 percent frozen, definitely one of my most memorable winter captures in nearly 20 years of carp fishing.
Got something you want to share with us? Send us your catch report!
This year we would like to invite you to share with us your catch reports and photos of carp caught with the help of ESP tackle. We’ll aim to feature as many as possible on the Facebook page and ESP website news page.
All we need is a good quality photo (maximum size of 1mb), a brief catch report (what, where, and how) and we’ll do the rest. Send it to catchreports@esp-carpgear.com.