Lodge Lakes

I have been a member at "the lodge" for a couple of seasons now, last year fishing the front lake of the two which has a much larger be it smaller stock to the back lake. Both of the lakes are quite small about 4 acres a piece so last year with this in mind I asked CT Custom Built to build me a set of rods to suit these small water conditions. Carl produced three lovely playing rods with the build finish being of the highest quality. If you are looking for a set of custom build rods then I can fully recommend Carl.

The plan this season was to fish the back lake during the Wasing close season ( June, July ) however due to my work load this did not happen. With the Wasing season just around the corner I decided to give the lodge a visit and because it would be a one off I decided it was the front lake that would receive my attention. The front lake has no weed and the lake bed is rather uniform with deep margins leading itself to a great stalking water with the fish fighting hard right under the rod tips. Best results come from finding the slightly harder spots usually resulting in a small difference in depth due to the fish activity exposing the hard clay bottom. It was with this in mind that I set about finding some harder spots to spod too, baiting in the evenings with no further disturbance usually meant a busy morning. Spots were baited with chilli hemp, carp crunch and chopped and crumbed crayberry boilies, I had great success last year while field testing crayberry on the lodge and Wasing and it is now available from Hinders.
When the fish are really having it at the lodge it look like a jacuzzi as they are constantly looking for bloodworm and other naturals, when it is like this I have had great success using small items in the spod mix as well as small hookbaits. After spodding, small whittled down 14 mm hookbaits were positioned for the night on rigs incorporating size 8 wide gapes, cortex hooklinks and 2oz leads and fished with small mesh bags of crayberry multi mix and little gem pellets.

The nights can be quite with early morning being bite time so I set the alarm for 4.30 as I usually like to re bait because of any crayfish attention during the night. One interested thing I have found while using crayberry is that the cray fish seem to leave them alone more so than other bollies. The first fish came at 4 o clock and was the first of seven caught that morning with five being over 20lb, no more spod is added during this time because it has killed the fishing in the past. By 11 o clock the sport had finished for another day so it was time to pack up and go to work, work that day was netting a lake to remove carp, I just can't get enough of them! I have included some photo's from last years successful season catching over 50 fish up to 31lb. It was good to get the rods out and catch a few but it was now time to think about Wasing and the big fish in there.