My angling past is a little mismatched to say the very least and if I were to truly go into it, detailing everything from refusing to hold the very first Perch, through my obsessive Tench phase and into discovering what is now the most popular species in the country, I would be typing for a very, very long time!
One venue that does stand out vividly though, even over a decade later, really does have to be spoken about!
Carlton Miniott Caravan Park is the first venue I ever wet a line and as is the case for many people, by far one of the most memorable places I will ever do so. My grandparents had a perfectly placed lakeside seasonal pitch here for many years and would occasionally take my younger brother and I away during the school holidays. We began catching the occasional stripey happy to take anything, and I really do mean anything, that we put on our hook! Worms dug from underneath the caravan? Obviously! Maggots on the rare occasion our grandad would buy them? Definitely! 6mm pellets, bread, sweetcorn, banana.. yep, none of those are typos, they would have the lot!
After a few years gradually learning the benefits of avoiding trees, tangles and everything else associated with flailing too long to handle 12/13ft rods around, we finally discovered the real fish in these lakes.
Now the lakes here were about as far removed from your typical venue as you could possibly imagine! Clear water, most of the stock untouched, features beyond your wildest dreams and besides the occasional tourer pitched up for the weekend, next to no anglers whatsoever! What it’s like these days however, I have no idea. As much as I do keep promising to revisit that old haunt.
Anyway, like I said, we did eventually manage to get past the 3oz ‘pests’ and what we came across still makes me smile to this day.
With our newly purchased telescopic rods and £3 eBay bite alarms we located some Tench routes, baited heavily with groundbait, sweetcorn and hemp, dropped some unbelievably basic rigs off the rod tips and waited up our assigned trees with our budget polaroid glasses for the dark green shapes to come swimming in right underneath us. I’ll never forget watching those fish drop down on the spots, filter through the silt and go absolutely ballistic as one them made the regrettable mistake of picking up the hookbait, sending the shoal into a panic and one of us flying from the branches to commence battle. Quite a feat for boys so young! Admittedly the fish weren't monsters, but they made our days!
We caught Tench after Tench after Tench, and the odd bigger Perch cropped up here and there too which I’m pretty sure we began to see as perfectly normal. Only now looking back do I realise just how good we had it and how rare that kind of angling has become.
We spent years on these lakes, even taking our grandads fiberglass boat out with lure rods (the same telescopic rods we used for everything else, just different end tackle). We would take Pike through the day, have a game of football down the playing fields before tea, and get the Tench rods back out for the evening. Absolute bliss!
With so many years having gone by, the passing of both grandparents and witnessing the destruction of so many other venues around me, I almost daren’t go back there at risk of spoiling those memories.
On the other hand, it’s the exact water I now find myself begging to find, and the fish I would give my right leg to catch!