My 5 year old has been asking to come fishing for some time.  As she loves camping, I thought I would bite the bullet and go as she is so keen to learn to fish.  I have got her a 5 meter pole and a 8 ft quiver tip rod, as I believe that you should start from the bottom and learn all your fishing skills.  I not a fan of the ready made carp angler.

We picked a nice bay area, away from anyone else.  This gave me room to teacher her and as we were looking around this spot, a nice fished popped it’s head out.  And I thought that would do me as well.  The main aim was to teacher her fishing, but if there where some nice fish in the area, who was I to argue?  I did promise that we would do the bivvy first,  but after seeing that fish, I did need to explain that my rods needed to go out because there were fish in the area.

Fishing away

Putting a small Roach back

First fish, poor thing

She was holding the maggots and had decided that they where her pet’s!

We where using bait-tech poloni groundbait with maggots over the top.  By early evening, she had managed a good 20 small Roach, but it was DVD time.

Back to my fishing lucky for me, I had fished this area a lot last year and had a few fish.

Rod-1 was fished close in, just where I had seen the fish showed itself, with a small bag of broken Poloni Boilies.  After seeing the fish, I was not going to put any bait out until later.

Rod-2  was cast 30 yard’s out, to a small gully, also with a small bag on with more poloni.

About two hours, the right hand rod was off.  It was attached to a very angry carp.  It put up an amazing fight and I was not even aware of it’s size.  That was until it beach itself in the margin, this was the point when I thought ‘oh, this could be a nice fish’ and also needed to get a wet foot to get the fish in the net.  Once I opened the net I thought, ‘wow this could be the 30+ common’ I had been after one for year’s.  I (we) placed the fish in the retaining sling and sorted out all the camera bits and pieces and the scales.

And the dial settled on 32 lb 12 oz – nice one at last.  I was overjoyed and my daughter was amazed at the size.

The night past with not a single take.  Around 7 am, I had a further 2 fish and lost one, all around the middle doubles.

My daughter was happily fishing away after Roach again on a small 8 ft quiver tip rod, all dressed in a monkey suit onesy which I forgot to take a photo of that.

Till next time
Richard