Beaver Farm Fishery. Major’s Lake. July 27th, 2003.

Hawthorne AC club match.

Well another club match today at Beaver Farm just outside East Grinstead. There are a number of lakes on site, catering for pleasure, match and specimen anglers. Today we were fishing Majors Lake, not the match lake (which is Maze Lake). It’s supposed to hold a bit of everything.
True to Hawthorne AC form on arrival in the car park we were greeted with drizzle and a cool wind. Well into the draw bag and it’s peg 18 for me, so off to get set up and a pleasant surprise with 2 beds of lilies on the inside and another couple to attack on the far bank.

Peg 18…..

At the all-in it was in with the pole alternating between the 2 inside lily beds. Unfortunately this only produced a few blade skimmers, which were attacked by jack pike if not landed in double quick time.

Well at least the drizzle had stopped and the sun had appeared, so tiring of doing battle with the jacks, I decided to try over with a cage feeder filled with pellet and 2 pellets hair rigged on the hook.Well this didn’t exactly set the world alight either, Indeed word had gone round that the whole lake was fishing badly, but it did produce a better stamp of skimmer to keep something going in the net.
Half an hour to go and another light pull on the tip and OOOOOH!!!!!!!! this isn’t a skimmer. Luckily with a bit of open water in front, I was able to take my time and 10mins later a nice Mirror Carp of about 8½lbs was safely in the net leaving just enough time for another couple of skimmers before the final whistle.

When the scalesmen arrived the total came to 26lbs dead, which was good enough for 3rd place on the day.

Back at the car park, and there was just enough time to flog £50 of raffle tickets for Elvington . So that was it for another day, Next stop is at ELVINGTON  Roll on the Weekend.

Old Bury Hill Fishery. Milton Lake. July 6th, 2003.

Hawthorne AC club match.

Well off to Old Bury Hill again today, this time it’s Milton Lake though. Strangely for a Hawthorne club match it’s not raining or blowing a gale, in fact the sun was actually shining.
So 17 are at the draw and what sticks to my hand? Peg 19. Now Milton Lake is home to some cracking Crucians, Tench, Bream, Roach and Rudd. The one thing missing is Carp, a deliberate policy by the fishery owner to stop the Crucians hybridising.

Now peg 19 had a large reed bed to the left of it and the normal approach is to fish as close to them as possible with Pellet, Meat or Corn targeting the Crucians and Tench. Put a maggot on the hook and you’ll get bitted out by the Rudd.

PEG 19……..
So at the all in, it was 2 big pots of pellet, meat & corn spread out along the reeds, and a pot of corn tight to the right as a back up. Three quarters of an hour in and nothing, not a bite on pellet or corn so on with some meat, a minute later and the float slides away, strike and all hell lets loose as a big orange tail waves at me before departing through the reeds and smashing me.
Now I’ve seen enough of those tails to know that it belonged to a Carp that was probably double figures. The commotion killed the swim but a drop onto the right hand side produced a small Tench of about 8ozs.
Back onto the left and the next 2½ hrs just leave me totally frustrated as I got reeded by another 5 large Carp, and managed to get just 2 of the smaller ones out.

A chat with the bailiff as he strolled round revealed that a load of Carp had obviously been transferred from the adjacent Bonds Lake by Idiots that believe that there should be some Carp in Milton.

The last couple of hours saw me finally get a few small Tench and a couple of nice Crucians, but the disturbance caused by the Carp and having to scale up my rigs in case another Carp put in an appearance had killed off any chance of putting a good weight together on the day.

At the scales I managed 19lbs 6ozs, for 5th place on the day, not the worst but leaving me frustrated as I didn’t feel that I’d got the best from the peg today.