Day Out at Park Farm Lakes, Hockering

My brother and I were getting a bit twitchy about not having been fishing for a few weeks so we decided to have a day at Park Farm Lakes, Hockering yesterday. These lakes are west of Norwich and not far from the A47. We arrived about 10.30 on a lovely spring morning. There was a match on at the largest (Deer House) lake and so we had the choice of the two smaller ones. As we walked past the next largest lake and nearest to the entrance (Woodhouse), there was a swirl in the water down near the mucky end but for some reason we decided to ignore this fishy invitation and continue on to the smallest (Copse) lake. Having read somewhere that fish like to be on leeward side I decided to choose the platform on that end of the lake nearest to all the floating muck as I thought that the fish might be hiding underneath it. My brother took the next platform to the right of me and slightly further upwind.

We were both float fishing which I guess is not the norm for a carp lake. Most other people were ledgering on the bottom. My brother used to be a real carp specialist but these days he just likes turning up without much kit and was happy to float fish. I had brought my pole rod with a new pole float that had specifically said "carp" in the shop which I took at face value. I used a No. 12 hook on 4lb line and the float was weighted with two No. 4 shot. I had brought maggots, sweet corn and luncheon meat as bait. I had also brought my traditional rod and reel and it was already rigged with a waggler and a size 16 hook, so I began with that with a couple of maggots. My brother had a similar waggler set up on his rod.

I was pleased that we had bites straight away and were catching a few small roach. As I wasn't sure how long it would take to get bites from the carp I opted to fish with both rods. I had a piece of sweetcorn on the pole rod and I placed the float in a gap in the muck (mainly rotting vegetation) at a depth of about 3 feet (the lake was about 4 or 5 feet deep where we were). I fed a few pieces of corn by the float.

It was lovely sitting on the grassy bank with the sun on our faces. A nice chatty lady came round to collect our fee and only charged us £5 each rather than the usual £7 as the match had been on. I started to get bites on the pole rod and had this small mirror carp to begin with:-

I then caught this common carp which was similarly sized (perhaps 7 inches at most):-

My brother then hooked a bigger common of perhaps a pound and finally in the morning I had fun landing this slightly battered common on the pole rod:-

This last fish is about 34cm in length or about 13.5 inches. It is difficult to say how much this fish weighed but probably between 1 and 2lb. I was glad that it headed straight into deeper water when I hooked it rather than into the "muck". I dread to think what it would have been like to hook a fish of say 10lb on such light tackle.

As lunchtime wore on the carp seemed to stop feeding and we didn't have any more for the rest of the day. We moved to Woodhouse lake after lunch as we could see fish cruising around in the shallows. There was frogspawn at the bank edge and I think they were feeding on this. We saw a couple of decent carp being landed by the ledgering boys but for the rest of the afternoon we were catching a few roach on sweetcorn and maggots.

All pictures and text copyright Duncan Hale-Sutton 2016.