On Monday I was back at Twynersh with a new student but the aims were the same as always, lots of fish. James has a similar backgroud to me, we both joined the same corps (REME) as boy soldiers but he was seventeen years behind me. He now works in project management on the construction of the new terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport. He had fished a little and contacted me (at his wife’s prompting), she wanted to help him stop “just feeding the fish on the river Thames”.

As he lives near me I picked him up from home and we arrived at Twynersh before it opened at 6.30 a.m. in order to get my favourite swim on lake one. It was already hot and this foretold a real scorcher of a day. I deliberately left most of my instruction for later and set up one rod with a method feeder and one with a light semi-fixed bolt rig and two small boilies, both on bite alarms. The aim was to produce some decent sized fish for trophy photographs before the heat became unbearable and the fish went off the feed. A liberal application of ground bait and loose fed pellets soon had the fish swirling on the surface and a waggler fished very shallow on another rod produced the usual batch of roach with a couple to one and a half pounds on a variety of soft hooker pellets (I wish I could catch them that big on the Kennet!).

James with a pound and a half roach

I had given up on the method feeder but the light carp rig produced a couple of male tench and a mirror carp a little over six pounds.

James with a small male tench

James with a small common carp

He was doing very well with the fixed spool reel and there were plenty of bubbles about two rod lengths out so I decided to try and get him his second carp on a centrepin reel. I set up my Harrison stepped up heavy float rod with an Arnold Kingpin loaded with eight pound line using paste fished hard on the bottom under a waggler float. The result was a beautiful common carp of nine pounds, James was hooked!

James with a nine pound common carp

We had a great time as his smiles on the photographs show and we talked much about our army days as well as the fishing. I am still thinking about some of the memories this triggered. James finished the day with a fine female tench of three pounds and was really pleased with his day out, despite the oppressive heat.

James with a three pound female tench

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