Fishing Crockerton

Banana Steve · #1 03-10-2007, 08:23 PM

My original plan was to fish Longleat, but I found that I had awoken before 5:30am, and not wanting to wait around for the gates at Longleat to open I decided that I would fish my local club lake at Crockerton, about 2 miles south of Warminster.

I arrived at the lake at 6:30am. As I walked through the gateway, I saw that there were four bivvies already set up on the near bank, so rather than disturbing them by clonking around with my kit, I decided to fish the far bank. As I walked past each of the bivvies, I noticed that they had their doors zipped down, and all I could hear was the gentle sound of snoring coming from each one of the bivvies.

As I walked around the lake looking at the different swims when I decided to fish peg 14, a good peg in the spring and summer, I knew from pervious times fishing the lake that this peg was around 7ft deep at 8 ½ mtrs. Normally in the spring, the better perch tend to congregate in the area, and I quite fancied fishing for the big perch.

So out came the pole with white hydro, and 0.13mm rig with a size 16 hook ready for worms, Ah that’s were I had made mistake and I had left my worms at home, oh well, so I decided to fish caster and maggot instead.

As the first hour went by, I never had single bite, so that meant a change of tactics. I changed the hook length to a 0.10mm 2.2lb and changed the hook over to a size 20 tubertini 808 barbless, that seemed to work, because for the next two hours as I started to catch small perch up to 8ozs. As the day progressed, the roach moved in and I was getting some nice roach up to 14ozs, then at around 1pm after getting some good sport on the light tackle, my float dip very slightly as I struck my elastic shot out. I knew I had a good fish on and I thought it might be a good Tench. However, the fish decided to run and at that point, I knew I was into a carp. As the elastic started to bottom out I had to shove my pole into the water to force the fish into dragging more weight, this normally takes the punch out of the carp and can help in tiring the fish. Five minutes later I landed the fish, not massive but a nice common, and I also need one for the species hunt, I was well chuffed, the carp weighed 4lb and 12ozs.

As the afternoon wore on, the fishing became a little harder and by 5pm, I was struggling to get a bite, so decided to call it a day. I brought my keep net in and I noticed I had caught fair few fish, I did not weigh them in but it felt like around 9-10lb of fish.

I really enjoyed the day and I am glad I didn’t fish Longleat and on the plus side I caught another fish for the species hunt for Solentavon which gives us another 1 ½ points.