Tag Archives: specimen hunting

After our fairly successful session at Higham Farm last year, Shane and I decided on a return trip this Spring, again for 24 hours and again targeting the resident tench. Shane had hatched a plan of attack and I liked it.  I really liked it.  This time we would fish on the Specimen Lake, which can only be fished on a 24 hour ticket.  Because of this, it tends to only attract carp anglers so the numerous other species resident in the lake only ever see the bank when they pick up a disgruntled carper’s bait!  Specimen tench and bream were definitely on the cards, plus who knows what large roach and perch could lurk in there. Besides fishing this lake, our approach was a little unorthodox too.  Rather than simply using scaled-back carp tactics, we would go armed with a couple of gallons of maggots each and fish positively by feeding aggresively – by introducing a large bed of maggots via a spomb, then topping the swims up when necessary. I chose to hair rig a mixture of buoyant Drennan imitation maggots and live maggots to create a balanced Medusa bait designed to hover just above the lake bed, …

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New Years resolution:  Update my blog more regularly! Three-quarters of the river season has already flown by since I last wrote, which is extremely slack of me, but hopefully there are still a few people out there interested in reading, so I’ll update on how my Summer fishing went and then I plan to do a small post on what I’ve done since (unfortunately not many fish to write about since November!), by which point I should be back in the habit of writing on here more regularly. The good news is that the fishing I did over the Summer was generally excellent!  I concentrated on a single river, the Derbyshire Derwent, and on a single species, Barbel. The regular rain certainly helped this Summer, keeping the levels topped up and keeping the barbel feeding confidently.  So many times in the past 4 or 5 seasons, I’ve heard anglers moaning – on the bank and on the internet – about the low river levels making barbel fishing difficult.  Personally, I never moaned because I still managed to find a good few fish, but I must say that sport was definitely better this season with a bit of extra water and …

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Sorry everyone, this post is almost 2 months late!  I started typing it shortly after the session and then never got the time to finish it!  So for now, here’s a slightly rushed post, but I’ve a fair bit of fishing planned in the near future so expect a flurry of activity on here very soon! A couple of weeks after the rivers closed I headed to local fishery, Tibshelf Ponds, to target the resident perch which are numerous (It used to be my local water and I would catch several, most times I fished there as a child), but I had an inkling that there were some really large ones there to be caught too. I set up with a combination of a swimfeeder rod (switching between a groundbait feeder & maggot feeder) and a heavy pole float fished on a new Bolognese rod that I’d bought and was keen to try out.  Bolognese rods have never really taken off in the UK, they are designed to fish the deep canals & slow rivers of mainland Europe, and they’re basically a telescopic whip (mine’s 6 metres long) with a reel seat and a rod ring on every section.  They’re …

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