With the spring making further inroads in the dreadful winter and my sucesses with the tench fishing I decided to try for the large crucian carp at Marsh Farm. I did really well there last season and I thought the weather should have warmed up enough for the crucuian carp to be feeding.

I arrived at about 7.30am to find that every other angler in the south east of England had the same idea, I have never seen it so crowded in mid week but I managed to get my favourite swim on the back lake. The first thing I did was to put in some bloodworm and trout pellets about a rod length and a half out with a liberal helping of hemp on top. I then set up my fifteen foot Harrison GTI match rod with a light weight centrepin reel loaded with four pound line. A small pole float and a size twelve hook on a three pound hook length completed the rig.

I measure the depth with a plummet, found the ledge where the depth dropped off into slightly deeper water and set the float to fish the bait just on the bottom. The bait was bloodworm pellet paste and after resting the swim for about twenty minutes I made my first cast. The float hardly settled before it sailed away and I was playing my first fish. I soon netted a crucian carp weighing exactly three pounds, a good fish for anywhere else but only average for Marsh Farm.

Three pound Crucian carp

The wind then picked up and made the pole float redundant so I switched to a small waggler to combat the surface drift. Over the next four hours I tried everything I could think of, different rigs, different baits and various presentations but i never got another bite. I can only assume that in my enthusiasm I had put in too much bait but very few fish were caught by the other anglers. Perhaps I had just dropped on the one fish that was hungry.

I will be going back to this fishery.

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