Canol Fisheries - Revisited

I revisited Canol Fisheries the other day to try and improve on my poor session a few days before. There was no wind and the lake was smooth as glass with all fish movement plain to see, prior to setting up a nice sized carp rolled in the water in front of my swim. I was feeling optimistic. 

The weather had deteriorated but I had with me my large umbrella so wasn’t fazed. I set up in the same swim I had hooked and consequently lost what felt like a large carp, I then fed the swim with a loose mix of hemp, halibut mix and sweet corn.

I setup with hair rigs on light method feeders on both rods and put the first in a deep depression to my front and the other on a weed margin which connected to a channel between weed on the other bank. Before long I was getting movement on the rod tips and had struck into my first fish, this proved to be one of many tench that must have been hoovering up the bed of bait that I had laid in the swim. 

There were quiet moments where I had no fish but the action was fairly consistent. I hooked into what felt like a good fish by the weight but the lack lustre fight it gave proved that I had a bream, I lifted it to the surface, it flapped once and was unhooked-gone. A shame as it looked and felt to be about 6-8lbs.

I thought it would be wise to throw some bread on the surface whilst the ducks were at the far end of the lake. As soon as the bread hit the water there were dark shapes swirling beneath, I wanted them to be carp but the slow lazy action was characteristic of the bream. I setup a rod with a surface controller and thought I’d have a go at these fish, after a short wait I had hooked onto one of the bream. The fish turned out to be a fairly beaten up bream with one eye blind and displaying a few lesions, I unhooked it in the water and let it swim on its merry way. I continued on the surface. Another fish took the bread and I reeled it in, it was the same beaten up bream! I wouldn’t have thought a fish would return to feeding on the surface so shortly after being caught, this surprised me and triggered a sense of sympathy for the poor beaten fish. 

I continued until the evening with a good session but disappointingly no carp. I had improved on my previous session but the loss of what felt like a big strong carp still hung over me. I think the numbers of carp in the water are lower than that of the tench and bream. I also believe the clear conditions of the lake may also make the carp more wily, next time I may use a different approach to target them specifically though not sure what that would be. I did see an angler the other day land an 11lb common with red maggots maybe that is the way forward?