By Martyn Russ a.k.a. Voodoo
With the great fishing we had at Cefn Mably still in our minds we decided to take a trip to another of our local lakes just up the road from us at Newport. The weather was forecast for a sunny day but with some cloud cover but when we woke and got ready, the skies were grey and miserable and there was no sign of the sun anywhere. Sure that the day would turn out ok off we went and set up at Peterstone Lakes in Newport. My mother had decided to fish what is called “the pencil” lake so i decided to join her and Brian but i went up the other end near the island.
My mother had decided on fishing the pole to start and Brian decided on the feeder. It wasn’t long before Brian was into his first fish of the day, a nice size carp around the 14 or 15 lb. mark. My mother was being pestered by the smaller fish and kept hooking into small roach and Rudd. After getting slightly annoyed with the pesky little things nicking her bait all the time she decided to switch to the feeder and ended up catching a couple of nice size bream around the 1 1/2 to 2 lb. in weight. Then in the second half of the day the sun decided to show its face and the warmer weather was soon with us. There were a couple of fish topping just of the reeds and near the island so Brian decided to fish a bit of floating bread just of the reeds and hooked straight into another nice Carp again about 3 or 4 lb. in weight.
I decided to set up the carp gear and put 2 rods out. ! rod was set up with a running Chod rig using the fluorocarbon fishing line that i got from Total Outdoors with a Tuti-fruity pop=up bait and the other rod was set up with a Zig Aligner. I started of checking the depth of the water using a marker float and soon found that it was all around the 3 to 4 foot depth from bank to bank. There was a gentle slope up towards the island but most of the fish topping seemed to be towards the reeds and under trees that were slightly hanging over the water.
There were a few other fishermen fishing for carp on the opposite lake known as “the swan lake” but they had no bites or even any line knocks from fish feeding in their swim. The lake seemed to be dead. It wasn’t long before i had my first take on the Zig rig but unfortunately i felt the fish bump and then come off. Talk about frustrating! This happened a couple of times and i started to realise that the fish must be feeling the resistance from the weight and rejecting the bait before it takes hold. This ended up the only action i saw on the carp gear all day. Apart from a stint on the pole and hooking a couple of small bream there was no other action for the entire day. That's how it goes sometimes and i will have to come up with a way of disguising the weight so its not detected when a fish picks up a zig in the water, something to think about…..
Tight Lines and Wet Nets……..
