Chris Clark, a musician friend of mine, is one of the founder members of the Molesey Anglers Curry Club and wanted to end his winter fishing fast with some tench fishing. With permission from Weller of the Yard I took him to the private Surrey lake that Les manages.

Prior to his arrival at my place Chris telephoned me to say that he had just realised his rod licence had expired and because this would be his first outing this year he had not yet renewed it. As we had planned to be at the lake at 8am the local post office would not be open and he thought we would have to wait until it was. I suggested that he bought his new licence online at the Environment Agency site and as soon as he arrived he did just that. Well done the EA.

The day was overcast with a brisk south westerly wind that brought quite a chill to the morning and would have made fishing with a pole float on running line tackle impossible. We both set up with quite heavy wagglers, Chris with a fixed spool reel and me with my favourite centrepin. He fished with soft hooker pellets and I used bloodworm pellet paste in adjacent swims.

First cast produced a nice common carp for Chris that was about eleven pounds.

Chris with double figure common carp

Despite a severe drop in temperature and a light shower we fished on until 3pm, catching fish after fish. We caught tench to four pounds, carp and bream. I lost a beautiful mirror carp that we saw on the surface shortly before it threw the hook, we estimated it to weigh about fifteen pounds. It would have made a lovely photo.

In all we caught about twenty fish between us, Chris was pleased to get “his string pulled” again as he had not fished since before Christmas.

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