The Creation of a Monster - My first carp

A conversation I had today took me back to when I first started carp fishing and reminded me of this piece that I wrote for a thousand word essay competition in the magazine of the English Carp Heritage Organization a few years ago.


 The Creation of a Monster

It had been a long, long, three months. The end of the season had come around all too quickly and as was normally the way back then a handful of gudgeon was about the sum of the winters fishing but I loved every icy minute none the less. By start of April the tackle box had taken up residence in the living room once again as bits got repaired, made, and bought, in preparation for the magical 16^th. The weeks dragged by as if wading through a sea of mud, the days gradually got longer and warmer and the excitement grew until it was almost unbearable, what was it to be, maybe legering a lump of meat for a chub down on the river or tucked in between the reed beds in my favourite weir pool floatfishing for roach? We would wait until a day or two before to decide my dad said, after all, too much rain could spoil our plans in an instant.

Friday June the 16^th 1989 was quite possibly the longest day ever, staring blankly out of the classroom windows at the sun beaten countryside or doodling on the page with my mind a million miles away in a world that seemed so near but yet so far away. Evening came and Dad walked in with a bag slung over his shoulder.  With the usual eagerness I craned to see what he’d got as he pleaded to be allowed through the door first. He’d been for a walk around the local reservoir on his lunch hour and seen a chap catch a carp off of the surface on dog biscuits of all things, we’d never heard of that before and I’d certainly never even considered the possibility of catching a carp. My dad had called into Roddy’s tackle shop on his way back to site and hence the bag was filled with the latest in carp catching technology, a bag of bubble floats, size six Drennan Specimen hooks, superglue and Chum Mixer’s. Rod’s was a proper old tackle shop, always full of blokes propping up the counter supping tea with fags hanging from the corner of their mouths, the air thick with smoke, a block of flats sits on the site nowadays.

So that was it then, three months of build up and now blown off the scale, bloody hell, we were going carp fishing! Christmas eve had got nothing on that night, it took hours to get to sleep and no sooner had we than it seemed Dad was shaking me awake at four a.m. but I wasn’t a bit tired, I was what I would later come to learn was called buzzing! Every bit of tackle we owned was rammed in to the car at breakneck speed and off we went, hoping every second of the way there that we would get a good spot. Into the car park we pulled and yes we were alright, not too many people there at all. It was a glorious morning, the surface was flat calm and the sun was just peaking over the rabbit dotted hill beside the water, that lovely fresh smell that you only get on that kind of dawn was in the air and the odd large ripple broke the steely surface of the lake just to add more fuel to the fire.

We headed up onto the dam wall well away from most of the other anglers and I set to on the mountain of gear piled at my feet, out came the Abu match rod, probably an inch and a half thick at the butt and weighing more than three of today’s rods but it was the best I’d got, on with the Silstar FX40 loaded with a hundred yards of six pound Platil line, thread it up through the rings with fingers shaking from a combination of the early start, lack of sleep and sheer excitement. Dad showed us what to do with the bubble float, threading it up the line a few feet and fixing it with a split shot below before tying on the size six and half filling the float with water, a slit was cut into a dog biscuit with a hacksaw blade and a dab of glue fixed the hook in. When all three of us were set up dad started firing out a few loose mixers with the catapult and out the floats went, it seemed like a huge distance at the time but it was twenty yards at the most. 

For probably two hours or so the odd carp would swirl at the biscuits and on occasions one would even have a go at the hookbait, god I’d never seen anything like it, it was a truly heart stopping sight, almost too much to bear. And then it happened. A great big swirl, a shout from my dad and a sweep of the trusty Abu back over my shoulder quickly followed by me being pulled forward down the steep bank towards the water completely off balance. Jesus, what the hell had I hooked, I hadn’t figured out what a drag was for by then and more than once the reel handle was pulled from my shaking fingers as the fish shot off into the depths. Gradually I got the better of it and we all peered for a first glimpse of this monster when all of a sudden up it came and with a jab of the net Dad scooped it up.

  

And so a carp angler was born, seven and a half pounds it weighed but to me at that time it could have been a record, I don’t suppose for a minute I realised at the time but the fish wasn’t everything, the build up, the anticipation, the surroundings and the excitement and so much more go to make the sport we love what it is, never let it become a numbers game because you’ll miss out on so much.



I ended up with three carp that day and my Dad and brother had one apiece too, from then on my river dabblings started to get less frequent and within a couple of years I was a fully fledged matching rod carper.  The water in question was the reservoir that featured in the "Winter on the Reservoir" five part series that I posted back in April and which ended up being more or less home from home for a lot of years, here's part one