14th April a commercial break at Emerald Lake

John had been asking me to go fishing with him for ages. Somehow the time had not been right due to holidays for him and me fishing for the roach and starting tenching. He doesn’t belong to any of the same clubs as me so we invariably end up at a commercial fishery. We both decided on Emerald Lakes at Highbridge in Somerset.
There are 4 lakes which are heavily stocked with most speices. We arrived at about 7am after a 50 minute journey time.
I had an idea’s on where we were going to start. It was on Emerald lake close to the car park. This lake has many islands which the carp like to patrol close to the bank.
Bait for me was to be red maggot and waggler float rod and a hair rigged 10mm pellet.
The depth was about 2.5 ft which is very shallow.
First we fed the swim with a few pellets of 6mm and then some hemp which really gets the fish grubbing around.
I was still setting up and more importantly setting up the tea making facilities while John was catching bream, roach and rudd. There were few other anglers on the lake and carp were crashing out everywhere.
The fish came on every cast mostly bream interspersed with the occasional roach, tench and rudd.
After a brew we said that unless the bream moved, then we would move to another lake and leave bream city to other anglers.
The ledgered pellet accounted for a few carp which put a good bend in my light fox duo 0.5 TC rod.
At 11am after countless bream we moved to another lake.
The swims were platforms out over the water which I’m not fond of.
The baiting was the same in about 2.5 ft of water.
John was the first to catch a carp on the float. They are not large in this pool and go to about 12lbs, however there are plenty of smaller ones.
There are about 4 or so holiday chalets around one side of the lake that can be hired and you can fish directly off the veranda if you like.

John just about to land this small carp.

Again there are a few islands around the pool and it’s up against the reeds that I decided to put the ledgered pellet rig. It was hilarious as each time I threw out a couple of handfuls of pellets the reeds would rock and roll with the carp foraging for them.

Of course the kid’s were on holiday and it was fantastic to see so many fishing and more importantly catching fish. Twice I had to rescue mis-cast floats that ended in the lilies and ledgers that ended in the reeds with  no tackle lost.

Again we lost count of the number of carp we caught. I think it was John who won the day with several larger ones caught on small pieces of luncheon meat on the float.

Well done John 5lbs 2oz

 Unfortunatley we had to leave at 5pm, however we had a great days sport and more importantly had a good laugh along the way.