Carp on the Brain. Part One.

 Since the challenge started I have struggled to catch anything half decent and my most recent trip to Marsh Farm, my quest to catch another Crucian ended up in a failure but managed to catch everything else in the lake, none of which were large - Bream to 1.9, Tench to 4.1, Perch to 9oz, Roach to 10oz and one extremely small Gudgeon, nothing which was setting the place alight and ended the session absolutely drenched as the heavens opened from 6pm onwards, through the ripples of the rain my float danced about as the Crucian's were playing ball but simply could not hook up, a return is already planned.

The smallest Gudgeon I've ever caught.

Not the biggest of the day but the best conditioned.

 After Marsh Farm I have been visiting a club lake of mine and Carp were the target, with not alot of time on my hands the single rod approach had been adopted, my favourite way to fish for Carp is stalking and remaining out of sight was allowing me to get into position almost undetected, perfectly placed for when the time was right and believe me it took alot of patience before the Carp became confident and now a pool of Carp were grubbing around under my feet I flicked my offering into the cloud of silt being kicked up, the float didn't even cock when a Carp tore off into open water, the fight was fairly short-lived as it wasn't one of the larger fish I had seen but it was a fish all the same.

 Around 6-7lb it was a baby but in good nick, after that fish was released the swim went dead and most of the Carp headed out beyond casting distance as they became uneasy so that was that. Fast forward a few days I ventured out with the same plan but a little more time on my hands, plus I changed time as an evening session was planned to see how the Carp played, after arriving I didn't have to wait long to find some and a few of these specimen's were large, 20lb plus and a couple near 30lb.

 The bigger specimen's were what I wanted and after just 20 minutes of stalking a nice chunky Mirror took my offering and my crystal waggler dipped slightly before I struck, a lump tore off around the bay and took a good 6-7 minutes to get towards the net which did just make it in.

A cracker of a Mirror.

 Best Carp of the season so far and it was spawned out, so at a bottom weight of 22.13 it was still a cracker and a Mirror too, happy days. The excitement didn't end there either as I had another Carp in the shape of a 12lb Common, job done and I will be back when some more time becomes available.

Beautiful colours, proper nice fish.