Hartleylands Farm Fishery. The Reservoir. July 3rd, 2004.

Today I thought that I had better try and get some practice in for the Maggotdrowning.com Individual Knockout Championships, Southern Qualifier that’s taking place on the Reservoir at Hartleylands next Saturday, but the weather wasn’t looking to good on the drive down, with the odd shower and strong blustery winds.

I arrived at the fishery at 9·30am and seeing that there were no bookings on the reservoir drove straight up there. There were only 3 other anglers fishing. A walk round made me realise why they were tucked into one corner as the wind was really blowing across the water. I suppose I could have toughed it out, but I decided to join the 3 others and dropped into peg 31 right next to the car park.

During discussions with Paul (The Owner) and Vince in the past, the fact that the good head of silver fish present tend to get ignored by most anglers who target the Carp has always come up, and today I fancied seeing just how many of these I could catch. To keep count I was going to drop a pellet into an empty baitbox for each 10 caught. Plumbing up I had 3ft at a top 2 length increasing to 5ft at 8 mtrs. The wind was going to make it uncomfortable to fish any longer, and would probably make for a slower catch rate.

I set up 3rigs, The 1st a top 2 set to fish to hand that would cover all depths, the 2nd at dead depth for 8mtrs and a shallow rig for the same line. Bait was 6mm expanders, cubed meat and sweetcorn. Micro pellet was to be the loose feed.
Starting off I put 2 pots of micro pellet in at 8mtrs and a ½ pot at 3mtrs. Out to 8mtrs with an expander at depth and within a minute the float slid away as a plump Roach of about 6ozs obliged. Bites and fish were pretty constant. All the while a pinch of micros were being flicked into the 3mtr line and my 1st put in on that line after about 45 minutes found that the Roach were waiting. These fish were unmarked and a good average size (6-8ozs) with some examples over the pound.

It must have been solid with roach as in the course of 4hrs only 4 Carp managed to muscle their way in along with a few Skimmers and a solitary Tench of about 3lbs. A fifth Carp finally trashed the to hand rig after about 4½hrs, so it was time to count up the pellets in the baitbox. 31 pellets plus the five Roach caught before the rig went west = 315 silvers, mainly Roach!!!!!!  One hell of a session, it’s at times like this that you wish you could use a keepnet.

After a well earned break for coffee and a sarnie I made another heavier rig up for a last hour targeting the Carp with big cubes of meat. The constant stream of micros had obviously resulted in a good few getting through to the bottom, and I managed another 11 Carp before packing up.
The largest of which is in the photo below. To give you some idea of size the net is a 24inch (2feet) pan. What it doesn’t show is how fat the fish was.

Another day like this next Saturday will more than do me, but as “The Jinx” is fishing it as well, I may be raising my hopes, only to have them dashed. ROLL ON NEXT SATURDAY!!!!!!!