The One That Got Away.

 On Friday morning I got up early, 4am to be precise and grabbed the Carp stalking gear for a couple of hours fishing before work, owing to the lovely warm weather the Carp are on the feed big time, so my plan was to find out where the scum lines were and if everything went to plan that's where I'd find the Carp.

 With only a couple of hours of to spare I didn't have a long time to hunt them down, but I didn't have to wait long and the first few Carp I saw were only small to medium fish up to 15lb or so, not large but great fun on the centre pin, but my efforts were reserved for a lump and after about half an hour, one big Common came from underneath the raft of floating seeds and leaves, sucking everything up it could find but using the centre pin it was proving very difficult to cast to, my range probably gets to around 20 -25 yards and this fish was patrolling a line of debris around 35 yards out, it's huge mouth hoovering everything in sight, oh how I wanted it to be my lump of float crust and after an hour of trying to fashion a decent chance at getting close it finally decided to head closer in, so I cast about 6 foot to left of it and the slight sound of the light peacock quill float and couple of shot hitting the surface seemed to had caught it's attention.

 Within 20 seconds it's mouth opened up and Whack!!! my float rod bent double when a massive Common stormed off with me in tow, I had hooked a proper lump, first estimates I put it at around the 25lb mark, just what I was looking for, 5:30am and I'm already having a workout that would banish the need for a gym and I only had it on for around 3 minutes, then the fight turned sour, as the fish started to get it's bearings the fish all of a sudden created a master plan and headed straight for a tree-line, you could see where this was going, but with the relatively light gear I was almost powerless to stop it and 30 seconds later, it was gone........ my chance had come and gone, diligently watching it for my time to pounce and it was the tackle selection they maybe let me down, but you live and you learn, after all these years of fishing for Carp, 6lb line was probably never a good idea!, but the 20 the other day was landed on the same gear, if that tree line wasn't there I would have bet a wad of cash that would have been landed, clever sod.

 Maybe next time I will land my quarry.