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Unsurprisingly as the summer's got underway I’ve been flat out fishing at every available opportunity and so haven’t found any time to update my blog, so first off I’ll apologise if you’ve been checking in for updates, but I’m sure you understand. Trouble is so much has happened recently I’ve had to force myself to take an hour to catch up or I simply wouldn’t be able to when I eventually got round to it!

Well, it's been a hectic month or so as usual and if you remember last time I'd returned to the huge Oxfordshire pit where I had a good start taking that incredible looking scaly beast. Well I kept at my plan by baiting a couple of spots and conditions fell right on my very next trip with warm wet weather and a lovely wind blowing consistently for a few days onto one of my spots. Arriving late in the evening I had the rods clipped up for the distance, so it was a simple job of tying on fresh hookbaits and after donning the waders, I set about getting the rods on the mark. I'd only just returned to the bank after getting the first rod out when I discovered that the waders were leaking and how!  I literally couldn’t have got any wetter if I had not worn any, I kid you not.

Oh well, there was nothing I could do, so I finished sorting the rods and made the mile walk back to the car for spare clothes, only to find I didn’t have anything except a set of sallopettes, but they’d have to do as I wasn’t looking forward to spending three days wet through.

With the lake being so flooded I had to spend the evening looking at a wall of trees and shrubs, my rods being on long sticks in chest deep water on the far side of the dense cover. Using secateurs I'd managed to snip enough room to get through to the rods in the event of a take, but the view was uninspiring to say the least as I could see little more than willow fronds swaying in the wind and so I turned in early hopeful of a bite at dawn.

Well sure enough I got my dawn bite, but unfortunately it was from a pike. The lake had seen a population explosion of pike a couple of years previously when the carp had a successful spawning which was a real rarity. This coincided with a weedy year for the lake and this enabled the carp fry to make it through the winter and get to a good size. Of course the small carp were soon all eaten and now the pike are starving and have learned quickly to adapt to any food source, my prebaited areas of fishy boilies being like a magnet to them.

Anyway I got another soaking getting the rod back out after my unwelcome visitor and so hung up my wet clothes and sat there in my salopettes and made some breakfast. It was looking like my chance had gone for the day when out of the blue around 8.30am one of the rods ripped off and without thinking I ran straight out into the lake in my dry salopettes, “great”!

The fish ripped off lots of line from the tight clutch as I stood there with waves crashing against me shivering uncontrollably and soaked from head to toe. Ten minutes later and not a minute too soon, I slid a nice scaly mirror into the net . By now the wind had picked up, so I broke down the net and after making sure it was well secured amongst the flooded trees out of the wind, I lit the stove to warm me up a bit as I was freezing cold. After a warm up I took a few self takes of the fish , a cracking mid twenty fully scaled, which I was well happy with. I still had the fish on the mat when the other rod was away so I wrapped him up in the net and placed him back in the shallows before wading out once more through the screen into the teeth of the brisk wind and the rod that was screaming for attention.

This fish was much slower and heavy and the battle was to turn out to be very memorable, but space prevents me from going into great detail here, I’ll leave that for another time.

Anyway half an hour later and several hundred yards further along the bank from where I hooked it, a big fish was eventually netted, much to my relief. Eventually I made it back to the swim, the cold now long forgotten. It was clear the fish was big, but until I got it on the scales I didn’t realize exactly how big. The fish turned out to be a new record for the lake by quite some margin and I was overjoyed with the result.

It of course doesn’t end there as much more has happened since, but I’ve run out of time so look out for my next installment ,
All the best,
Nick.

• Carp Fishing