Royal Signals Carp Angling Champs 2023

Time for something a bit different, I am going to drop in a few of my carp/speci sessions on here aswell so that you can get an idea of the mindset and tactics involved on these.

Cromwell lake near Newark was the venue, 18 acres of crystal clear water with depths going down to over 20ft, this can be a challenging venue.  The weather forecast was pretty good so that could not really be used as an excuse.

I had booked on for the night before as it meant I didn’t have to drive up at stupid o’clock in the morning, and settled in peg 13, I chucked out a couple of pva bags pushed a 45m baiting pole under a bush along the margin.  I saw a good 30 in the bay to my left but it wasn’t interested in eating and the birds managed to spook it off aswell.

On the first official day I was packed down nice and early and managed a walk around the lake, having fished it before my top choices were pegs 18, 14 and 2 as they covered some shallow water in the middle of the lake and I have always seen fish there when I have fished the lake in the past.  I had seen fish show all over the lake so the only swim I didn’t really want was peg 9.

I came out in the middle on the draw, and fortunately peg 2 was still in there, I had also been eyeing up peg 7 but fortunately went for 2 as I had fished it before.

On starting I cast a bare lead out onto the shallow water only to find that there were very few clear spots and all of the bottom seemed to be covered in silt weed, even so I started on PVA bags, but after the first recast it became obvious that these were wrong as I could not feel a nice drop, so after a few hours my plan changed completely.

I found an area were the silkweed seemed shorter and decided to put some long ronnies into it with a scattering of  bait over the top, I was feeding crushed DNA Baits S& boilie, corn and pellet using a mini skyliner spod sop that the disturbance was an absolute minimum.

I cast them out at 8pm and settled in for the night.  At about half 4 I woke up for some reason and watched the water over my spot, as I did so a fish showed, so all was good in the world. Now in my normal fishing I am usually up and watching the lake for signs before first light so that I can move onto the fish, but in these matches when you are looking for 1 or 2 bites I generally lay in bed and do it as I can only fish the water in front of me.  Anyway, I dozed off and was soon rudely awoken by my left hand rods bobbin hitting the floor,  I ran out of my bivvy in my socks and soon thought that I should have put my trainers on as the gravel was brutal…..

I was however attached to the fish, but it wasn’t doing a lot and I thought it was a tench so I walked the rod back to the bivvy, slipped my trainers on and played, well wound the fish in, as it didn’t do a lot, and I got a mighty shock when a slab of a mirror wallowed on the surface in front of me as I put the net around it.

 

First job, get 3 mini spods back out in the area to a) top up and b) spook the fish away and allow me to get the rod back out there, that went well rod reset and then Marcus and I weighed and took photos of the fish.

I tipped the scales at 30lb 5oz and was big enough to take me into the lead, my plan was sorted for the next morning and the day was spent flinging zigs out at a variety of depths and ranges hoping to mug a cruising fish, it didn’t happen.

 We all wound in for a couple of hours in the afternoon of day 2 for a BBQ and catch up, most people put some bait in before going and this seemed to kill the fishing off as only a few more fish were hooked.

In total 5 fish were landed and mine was the largest so I won the R.Sigs Carp Angling Championships for the first time with Jim as a runner up, (So the same top 2 as last year)

 

Lots of fish were hooked and lost in the weed but that is carp fishing I am afraid.

Thanks to Nick for doing most of the heavy lifting before the event and also for the team at Cromwell for looking after us for the duration of the event.

What would I do different:

I think I fed too much before going on the BBQ and this scuppered my chances on the second morning by having too much bait in the swim. I feel it was the best swim choice with what was available to me, maybe if I had moved to my left boundary, but the guys in Rosies retreat were sending their baitboat all over the place so I never really knew where they had been putting bait or rigs before I got in the swim.

Rigs used:

Rod: ESP Onyx 3.25lb

Reel: Shimaono Ultegra 14000 XTB

Mainline: 15lb ESP Syncro XT

Lead: 4oz pear

Rig: 10 inches of ESP semi stiff tungsten loaded and a Ronnie rig with a size 6 barbless Krank.

Hookbait: 12mm Pink S7 Pop Up