Canal carp - a crisis of confidence.

Everyone who fishes canals will have some kind of tale or tome of canal carp to tell. I suspect it's the linear nature of canals that helps information travel down them to be dribbled like honey into people's ears by passing travellers. Personally with all the time I've spent on canals I reckon I must have heard thousands of stories about monsters hiding on the far bank cover over the years. The truth of the matter is that all canals contain carp, be them born or bred, dumpers, stockies or escapes, they are there and beyond all the bluff and bluster you hear about how to catch them there is one single box to tick in order to attain success as far as I am concerned; location. Quite frankly you could fish in a carpy looking location for the rest of your life and not catch a single fish if it is simply not their chosen home.

With regards to location, I can think of six spots on three different sections of canal that I have either seen or caught carp from. I have spent a fair bit of time on these spots in years past and as much as I reckon the fish have probably grown, I'd like to find a few unknown fish to me, so I have started looking at few more likely spots with supposed form to target. The first is a very well known supposed carp haunt of the Grand union were fish of preposterous sizes are reported to swim and I gave it a look on an evening session recently when the weather was fine enough for carp.

I like to keep things simple when carp fishing and on the canal, rigs hidden in PVA bags are always the way to go. Firstly you can cast them into any tiny space you want with little fear of tangles, secondly they sink slowly without the lead burying in the deep silt that can line the bottom and thirdly they are great for fishing for one bite by presenting a concentrated pile of smelly bait. All that said it seemed on this occasion my simple tactics might not have been reliable, as I did not generate anything near a bite in five hours. I had a few liners but definitely no contact with the rigs, which was concerning. Without dwelling on a blank I moved on to the next session along with my new compact kit.

I feel I should mention the new set up I am using this season for carp. You know I've always felt taking twelve foot carp rods and big reels down the cut to a bit of overkill. Then a while ago I bought a 9ft Nash dwarf rod for stalking carp and after seeing how great this little rod was I invested in a second one and matched them up with a pair of Korum KXI reels. I then bought a specific rod bag for the Dwarf rods which is not much over three feet long and also carries my 36" carp net with handle that splits into two. All the rest of the stuff I might need packs into my Korum day sack which leaves me with a kit so compact that no spot is too far away.

My next canal session was a disaster and that was pretty much all my fault. I agreed to meet Mick on a very reliable section of canal where he was going to fish for zander and I for carp. Anyway to cut a long story short I decided to hang out with Mick and have a chat rather than head straight down to the banker spot. As nice as it was catching up with Mick, it allowed some else to get on my spot. Frankly I was shocked as I have never seen another carp angler there ever and here was one right where I wanted to be. When I arrived and after chatting to the other angler I set up shop a little way up the canal  in a spot of lesser quality which produced zip all once again.

Confidence in any sort of angling is key in my opinion and at this point I had none. Worst of all though I had opted to use a new bait for this canal carp caper and as good as it smelt to me I wasn't sure it was doing the business. I expected those starving canal bream to be on it like a tramp on chips and so far I was saving a fortune on bite alarm batteries. With this crisis of confidence in both bait and me I had no choice but to have a session on somewhere a little easier. So with a spare afternoon off work I went over to fish Jubilee pools, or specifically horseshoe pool.

These pools suffer a bit of an image problem if you ask me and some of that is down to their name I reckon. Though referred to as pools they are in fact pits where sand and gravel were extracted from along with Ryton pool and Meadow lands. Should they be referred to a jubilee pits then certainly in carp fishing circle they would command a bit more respect than a lowly old pool. That aside Horseshoe for one looks like a gravel pit if you look beyond the wooden stages that line the lip of the pool like teeth. And the fish do behave more like gravel pit fish as they swim around the clear weedy water. The only way this pool differs from most gravel pits is in stock density. Being the coffer fillers they are, the controlling club keeps them well overstocked with fish as to please the day ticket paying masses. Weirdly though the fish seem to exhibit different habits. The small carp are nearly always lingering in the upper layers of the water, where as a totally different size class patrol the margins like nervous submarines, and it was those nervous submarines that I wanted to test my confidence out on.

After walking round the lake a bit and finding most of it empty of anglers, I fed four swims on one bank where I had seen a few groups of bigger fish nosing around. These bigger fish love nothing more than coming into the margins in the evening and mopping up all the discarded bait, and that's exactly what I wanted my freebies to look like. After putting out a handful of corn in each swim along with a few broken boilies and whole boilies I waited and watched to see which of the four swims offered the batter chance. Random fish kept coming into all of them but one swim had a couple of groups of fish the others didn't repeatedly stopping by, so thats where I decided to set my trap. Once all the bait was gone I quickly nipped in and set up my rods and alarms on the path leading into the swim. There was a large clear area all around the platform so carefully placed one rig on the further edge of the clear spot and the second right under the platform. After making sure my line was pinned down tight to the bottom by a few blobs of tungsten putty and a small back weight I re-baited with more broken boilies and corn and retreated well away from the peg. 

The fish were soon back and I waited a good hour before the water finally erupted and the alarm screamed as a fish found my sneaky two halves of boilie bait and sucked it in. It took a while for the fish to fully get its head round its circumstance and when it did the rod really started to bend.

After an epic tussle which destroyed the swim and my other rod, I finally dragged the net out of the brambles and slipped it under a stunning little common which filled my confidence jar close to the brim.

After I released that low double a few swims away I returned to carnage. In the panic of the fight everything had gone everywhere. My second rod was lying on the floor with the line still over the buzzer. There were mats, selfie sticks and half the contents of my bags strewn all over the floor. As I walked towards the second rod on the floor the alarm beeped once and thinking it was about to go off I froze. From just at the edge of the swim I could see a real strange group of fish had drifted into swim and were picking up odd bit here and there. There was a golden tench, a tiny common carp and a huge mirror. I would have said they had all arrived separately until the golden tench moved off and its buddies followed it. Quickly I got both rods out a again this time with a PVA bag on each. Both were in same positions as before when I saw the golden tench reappear followed by its two carpy friends. None of them dipped onto the baits but they all paused a moment as they passed over them. I watched those three fish drift in and out again and again, each time the mirror seemed bigger.

Soon my time was running out and worst of all their confidence was building with the more time they spent in the swim. With little over thirty minutes till I had to be off the water I watched as the two carp homed in on my close in bait. I watched willing them to dip down towards it... then Bleeeeeeeeeep the moment was shattered by the bite alarm I watched confused as the two carp shot off to the left and my line on my right had rod surged out into the lake. Whilst watching the fish I wanted to catch near one line someone had snuck in and taken the other. It turned out to be a very boisterous common not to dissimilar to the other apart from this one was rushed in a bit which meant it was very lively on the mat hence the crap selfie with it.

This trip to Jubilee pits was well served to boost my confidence in both what I was doing and in the bait I have decided to use. Now all I need is the weather to warm up a bit and I should be able to start homing in on a few canal targets myself.

Change of plan.

It's not that often that I walk away from a venue before I've even started fishing, but that was the case the other day! I'd dropped off both JB and BB and made my way to a predetermined section of canal for what I had planned as a day of light lure fishing and roving off into the Warwickshire countryside. Admittedly I was a bit on the late side arriving. But after I did eventually arrive I got the gear out of the car, walked the short distance to the canal and peered at the water to see the boats had been at it for hours and done their worst. Literally, I reckon moles would have been more at home in that water than fish. Any love for the venue evaporated quickly and left me feeling rather flaccid about the whole session.

It took me a while to go through the local venues to choose an alternative that was in reasonable proximity to where I was and where I needed to be. As all I had was a very light lure outfit, the choices narrowed quickly and rather than go to another section of the same dirty canal I opted to head over to Leamington Spa to have a session on the Leam town waters again. The torpid Leam I surmised might be a good candidate for some light lure fishing and having been there a while ago I knew the waters running through the Victorian parks  held a few nice fish amongst all the bank side cover.

I reckon I'd been fishing all of ten minutes before I figured I'd made the right decision to move venues. The Leam it turns out is rammed to the reeds with small perch, and those small perch loved the tiny lures I was casting into the river and hopping slowly across the current. Literally every cast was getting some kind of  hit and in many cases multiple hits. There must have been groups of these tiny little predators chasing the lure back to the bank, gobbling it up and spitting it out until one got caught out.

All the perch activity raised the attention of the pike as well. Several small perch got chased around in the first swim until the naughty jack in question saw my lure and had a go itself, ending up getting hooked close to my bank after thinking its quarry was about to get away and engulfing it with a flare of its gills.

The fun went on all day and catching huge numbers of tiny perch meant it was only a matter of time before I located some bigger ones. In the shadow of a huge white building the far bank cover ended at a brick wall. Just where the cover ended, the wall began seemed to hold some different sized perch. At first it was just ones half as long again as the wasp average, but with the odd half pounder here and there. Someowhere amongst the multiple plucks from the smaller fish came a hard thump as something bigger hit the small spiky shad I was retrieving. The little fish and the small pike had proved sporty enough on my 1-7 gram outfit; this fish though was really having it. After playing it out in the flow in the middle of the river initially, it moved into the shallower clear waters close to my bank and I saw one chunky perch with my lure hanging out of its mouth being tracked by its identical twin. The second fish disappeared at the sight of my net in the water but the hooked fish went in good as gold.

I ran out of fish-able bank by mid afternoon and after a quiet break for lunch on a park bench in the sun, I turned around and worked my way all the way back down the stretch. Amazingly even after casting hundreds of times into the already fished swims, the stripy hordes were still well up for attacking the tiny lures as they skipped across the bottom. By the time I reached the end of the stretch, the river was in shade and the sun was heading towards the horizon. How many of those tiny perch I caught through the course of the day was impossible to calculate, but what I do know is the Leam where it runs through Leamington Spa is a brilliant venue for light lure fishing, and I will definitely be back for another go before winter sets in.