Sam Dowie lands three twenties to 26-08 in one day.

Sam and Steve Dowie have enjoyed their family stay in the Cottage this week. Despite the obvious tough conditions of bright sunshine, very high air pressure and mist they have managed to land 6 Carp between them with son Sam beating Dad Steve 4-2.

They used their obvious experience to fish very sensibly. By which I mean resting the swim during the day when all the Carp wanted to do was cruise (this no doubt encouraged the Carp to stay in the Cottage swim in numbers) and concentrating their fishing in the evening/ night/ morning and when there was either some cloud cover or wind disturbing the surface. They also fished small boilies in PVA bags containing crushed boilies, often cast into weed.

Thursday was a magic day for Sam who described himself very happy with Mirror carp of 23-04, a heavily plated 24-08 and this fantastic Linear Mirror of 26-08. This Linear Mirror, which does not get caught very often, was last caught by Cory Hicks in May at 27-08 and despite being in great condition clearly has some way to go to regain this weight. I would expect this Carp to be approaching 30lb by next May. This beautiful Carp ( which you can see being held by Trish O’Reilly on the Cherry Lake page of this website) was caught in May 2014 at 24-04. Steve said the Carp had a very colourful belly. In fact looking at the photo below, she is almost becoming two-tone, with the colours being split by the lateral scales. It will be interesting to see how her colours have changed when she is next out.

The right hand tree margin bank of the Cottage swim turned on for Sam for about 8 hours as a strong north-easterly wind got up. This moved the Carp slightly  from in front of the house bank and more importantly provided the trigger for some active feeding which Sam took full advantage of.

It appears that the weather is due to break next Monday with pressure dropping and several weather fronts moving through. I expect this change in weather to ‘kick’ the Carp into action with a number of the 30+ Carp hopeful;l;y visiting the bottom of our guests landing nets! Time and anglers will tell!

We do have a number of Lodge vacancies during October, so if you fancy your chances give us a ring on 01285 869887 or 07545 495881.

Joshua Clark initially struggled on Cherry Springs with just a few runs and Carp over the first few days of his stay in Kingfisher Lodge. A switch to Halibut pellet resulted in eightCarp during Thursday including this impressive 18-04 Mirror below.