The Carptopia Story…

As young anglers we all searched for ponds or secret pools and leaned over bridges hoping to see a wild fish and sooner rather than later it would be the carp that caught our attention. So now, 40 plus years on since I first caught my carp I am still in in the same pursuit and the draw of the unknown.

Amazingly, I was invited to look at a 60 lake with a view to opening a carp fishery, then finding out it had not been fished for carp would definitely get your attention. On arrival last November, my first few words I muttered on a video I took from the dam wall were “It’s very carpy”. I was in awe as I looked into the wild, untapped and unknown sight in front of me. I had a good look around from the few vantage points available at the time and then had a very informative meeting with the owner where we positively discussed the lakes potential.

It looked amazing, even mid November. A very quiet location and TBH just my sort of water. Some of you may know I like the vast lakes, either little fished and off the radar, the venue in front of me was just the ticket. This is going to be special.

It was blowing a gale at the time as we had a massive low pressure system last autumn and this was on the tail end. I hoped to get onto the lake as I needed to find out more information about the lake. Mid afternoon the skies eased a bit and the sun shone through a little. The Raptor was launched into a new chapter of my life and the echo-sounder soon registered depths down to 15ft and I soon found 20ft close to the outlet. That’ll do nicely!

I am a big fan of water volume and it had ticked a box already as the overflow was charging through. Spending a few hours at the venue I concluded that it ticked all the boxes. I’d seen bubbling in the top peninsula area already and some very coloured water in the same zone with good and varied depths all around.

There was marginal and sporadic weed, lots of hard areas at any range and silt running through the middle as the norm. I saw lots of naturals including swan mussels and pea mussels in the crystal clear water.

As I driving to the lake I originally thought we could possibly have a good number of swims as the lake was 60 acres (maybe 5 on each bank) but the owners wanted it to remain special and only have 4 or 5 zones in total. Positioning the swims like this was a dream to the carp angler and made planning fairly easy as the peninsular zone was already a no brainer. Access would be mainly by boat immersing you into the top bays and having an enormous amount of space to enjoy.

The two large central areas would be accessed by boat (both great ambush spots). One swim is 40m from the showers/toilets proposed area the other is acceesible via a boat.

Lastly, one or two fishing areas would be located at the dam end where the average depths are 8-20ft by outlet. This is a big area but mega long distance fishing would not always be needed here so we could cover this prime area of 18-20 acres with two large natural swims.