Dec
Agecroft Pond is a bit of an enigma – it screams fish but it contains very few. The local angling club stocked 200 8″ carp in 2016, and as yet no one has ever caught one. I’ve fished this lake a handful of times, and never had much success other than a few small roach and the odd jack pike.
So last weekend, I thought I would give the lake a couple of hours of my attention, and because I wasn’t expecting much in the way of sport, invited two friends to join me for a fish and a chat.
I set up using the exact same rig that I’d used on recent successful roach sessions on other local ponds – a very light 0.3g pole float, a size 20 Kamasan B511, and a 0.08mm hook length. Again bait was punch bread on the hook, and liquidised bread (a very small amount) as feed. But as it was a cold day I used my pole at 13m to access the deepest water in the lake (6 feet) where I expected the fish to be lying up.
I’ve become used to my float sailing away immediately, but on this lake it was ages before I caught anything and with afternoon daylight being short at this time of the year, it was soon time to think about returning home.
To satisfy a theory about the pond I saved the 3 roach i caught in a bucket, and at the end of the afternoon set up a pike rod, and used the roach as bait..
It took less than 5 minutes before my old fashioned pike bung did the old fashioned thing……….. it slipped away – and a nice little jack graced my net.
In 3 casts…. I caught 3 jacks from different pegs……. good luck?
It made me think about a few things….. where had the carp gone ? why was it so hard to catch small silver fish? was the lake over populated with pike? or have all their prey been eaten by the black death?
I don’t have any answers but there appears to be a real imbalance in the fish population of this lake thats becoming evident over the years
Word on the street is that the angling club are currently looking at a significant restocking with roach, rudd, bream, tench and crucians and carp…. lets hope this brings the place back to life.
