Bailiff Comments

Week Commencing: Sat 03/06/2023

An Immaculate spawn

With steady summertime temperatures hovering around the 30 degree range for the last week or so, it was no surprise that early on the Sunday morning the carp in the main lake began to spawn hard.

The margins where alive with action from the carp all along the tree margin of Stock Pond, up and around the head land and down along the far margin of Big Girls.

The carp put on quite a display for the next two days.  One of our guests here from Germany, Benny Versemann, getting some amazingly clear footage under the trees with his Go-Pro camera identifying many fish such as Clarky’s, The Football and the very elusive Immaculate Common.  What a sight to see……. she looked in great condition and huge!

Lets start with one of our European guests, Basti, who after choosing to go into the ‘Tree Line’ swim and having never fished with zig rigs before was delighted to have caught one on the Thursday from his swim on a black piece of foam on a zig.  He managed to get the fish into the net and safely transferred into the retainer sling ready for some nice early morning shots of it.  It turned out to be one of the better fish that had been spotted on the Go-Pro spawning a couple of days prior at the opposite side of the lake ‘The Football’ weighing in at a spawned out 47lb 8oz.  He was absolutely made up with this and said he had only hoped for ‘just one Gigantica carp’ and he had done just that.

Just to make Basti’s trip even sweeter he also managed one of the original small scaley mirrors that reside in the lake called ‘Long Leave’ weighing 26lb 8oz.  Again, on a zig rig with a piece of black foam.

Well done Basti, you got your dream of catching one Gigantica carp and then went on to do even better and catch two!

On Tuesday just after dinner service Maik fishing in ‘Baxters’ returned to his swim and managed to get a quick bite on his zig rig, again with black foam, and managed to land one of the original fish known as ‘Drop Scale’ weighing 32lb.

Despite his hardest efforts this one turned out to be his only fish, but I believe he was more than happy just to have the one fish especially how hard the lake has been fishing the last week.

Mark Robinson started his week fishing in ‘The Stink’, but after a handful of nights spent in there with no action and seeing fish constantly in ‘Scotties Corner’ it wasn’t long before he was upping sticks and on the move.  Seeing as he described “a great big fully scaled fish in there” was enough to turn his attention in to that area.

Fishing solid bags at the weed bed near the leaning tree was enough to tempt one called ‘Nova’ into his net weighing 25lb 12oz on the Thursday morning.  Mark tried as hard as he could for the last couple of days to sneak one more out, but it sadly wasn’t to be.

On the final full day of the week for this group of anglers we had another Mark, ‘Mark Gibbs’ fishing in ‘The Alamo’, where he managed to finally put the net under one of the Gigantica residents that had been tormenting him all week close in in front of him putting on a dolphin show everyday.

It was a nice fish too, one being called ‘Bel Bambino’ and weighed in at 28lb 10oz.

Steve Harrison had a tough week in ‘Co’s Point’ especially made even tougher when he had managed to slip one into the net for it to then shortly after it managed to escape over the net before we had the chance to come around to photograph the fish for him.  Gutted to have not seen this one and get some snaps for him.

It was a very tough weeks fishing and well done to everyone for their efforts, but with the fish spawning for the first half of the week it was always going to be a tough time.  Great company from all the anglers on this week, despite the conditions they all stayed positive and had a great time regardless.

“Lovely Jubbly”