In 2011 thoughts began to wind their way into my head of a new challenge, a new adventure one that was right on my doorstep and was just waiting there to be taken. I have been fortunate, a blessing of birth perhaps? To live in a village as a child where I could walk a hundred yards in any direction and be in a field full of adventure and wildlife. To have the rural countryside of south Cambridgeshire as my playground, its streams, rivers and ponds, that's a blessing indeed. Perhaps my view of the world started there? All I ever needed was right on my doorstep, a short walk or a happy cycle ride away. My life has been filled with smiles, wonderment and adventure because of fishing and at 55 years old I still feel the same, I still have so much to discover and it's all in my back yard

I was getting bored again and my fishing was moving back into the bivvy up and wait approach, I needed a change something that was far more active, more adventurous. Looking back in my fishing diaries from 2004 to 2011 I had fished quite a few different waters. Mostly gravel pits in and around Cambridgeshire of all sorts of shapes and size and one adventure that epitomises the kind of fishing I most enjoy springs to mind immediately. It was right on my doorstep and had been on my radar ever since the late Barrie Rickards offered me a 'life-time' ticket for it back in 1980 something. I didn't fancy it at the time and so did not take it up, but by 2006 the lake was full of twenties the best 36lb+ and many of them were right good looking too! And so I went forth and landed over 2 dozen fish to upper twenties and as many doubles in a summer and had a whale of a time!

It is a beautiful lake, split up into four main areas by two long islands in its southern section and totals about four acres in size. Since I was a day-ticketer I could only fish dawn till dusk but that was enough. The main body of the lake never interested me much and so I paid little attention to it. However the quite back areas of the lake in-between the long islands and the back-bay with its serene intimacy did. The lake was for the most part festooned with lilies which meant that the bottom was quite clean underneath. Baits presented around and under these lilies was not a problem as they were not the thick Amazon tree type of Lillie but the ornamental type which is thin and straggly and weak and which would simply part out of the way of a bow taught line with a crazy carp on the end of it. The bait I was using too played a big part in my success as well as the way I was presenting it. It was an early version of my 'Lemon Soul' a fishmeal/citrus combination used in conjunction with short rigs and PVA bags, the carp just went mad on it. Packed with crumb around the hook for protection and topped off with chops and boilies, PVA bags became the order of the day and brought me huge success. A one to four ounce lead (depending on the situation), four to six inches of Kryston's 25lb Snakebite and a nice tough size six fox series four hook completed my rig, all tied to 25lb mainline

I always try and simplify my fishing by using a logical thought process as well as a no fuss attitude. This is based on many years observing and fishing for my quarry which in turn allows me to take a rational approach. One of the very worst things you can do when fishing is to base your approach on questions you do not have the answers to. Why? Because you will end up convincing yourself to fish a certain way from nothing more than an idea formed out of confusion and a large serving of hope. Much better is to have your sessions based on what you know works and go from there and that way hopefully you won't be playing catch up with the fish. I have found that generally carp are always feeding somewhere and that sucking and blowing is a natural and normal process that carp undertake to regulate what they swallow, one it repeats tens of thousands of times throughout its life. So given that I don't worry myself to much about if they are feeding and picking up my bait, they are, I just stick to tried and trusted methods I know work to turn those fish into fish on the bank. Typically a lot of time is spent motionless waiting for the carp to respond to your methods and this can be for many valid reasons however I have found the opposite to this works much better and is much more fun too. So on this lake with its plethora of ambush spots I didn't remain motionless, I move around the lake constantly and I responded each time I saw movement. PVA bags, short stiffish rigs with a shrink tube 'crank' off the hook or a swept shank hook work together really well. Its tangle free for a start can be placed anywhere you want, will always hit the deck and be in the zone and is consistent in the way it works. So you're not sitting there asking yourself the unanswerable question 'Is my bait presented right?' because it is. The short rig (important) and crank will ensure that the hook point turns down to its optimum hooking angle immediately the bait is picked up (sucked in) so the carp is given little chance of movement without being pricked or hooked thus you reduce the variables, which is important, because those variables are questions and you don't want to many questions.

Now as far as the shrink tube 'crank' or swept shank hook is concerned I will elaborate. I use the crank as part of the immediate straightening process of the rig that occurs on a short hook link when the carp sucks the bait into its mouth. The hook is already turning before the bait is fully in the mouth because once it is in the mouth it will be spat out, no time for it to turn in my opinion. The PVA bag and the way I packed it was important too because it allowed me to present my rig in the same way every single time I put it out so no questions there either. I used exactly the same method each time. The hookbait and hook were placed in the bottom of the bag with a piece of PVA foam either side of it, this provided flotation at the hook end ensuring correct orientation and better presentation. I then tipped four finely crumbed boilies around my hook to protect it but also ensuring that the point was not snagged up in chops and that it could move free of the bags contents once in the water. Then I added four boilies chopped and topped off with four boilies whole. Give the bag a squeeze and press down on the contents to exclude any air pockets, fold over the corner lick and twist around the mainline and it's done, quick, efficient and simple. So with this simple yet precise setup I would lay my landing net on top of my rods on my pod, sling my bag over my shoulder and simply pick the whole lot up by the central bar on the pod and walk around the lake with it. I got to know the lake very well and soon identified areas to concentrate on. So, within a few day sessions I had a 'beat' and I would bait up the spots around the beat first thing at dawn and then simply go around keeping them baited up until I spotted movement or fish. If I did I would put my kit down, swing out a bag and sit back with the kettle on, giving it half an hour to an hour each time to get a result. One such morning I landed three good twenties and two upper doubles doing this. I worked hard at it looking in every nook and cranny for signs of feeding fish on my bait and it paid off. So I have digressed away from the River Cam but the point is that without learning and using these methods of 'observation and fish' I would not have been as successful on the river because the fishing there is certainly swayed far more to this kind of fishing than the sit and wait approach.

So when these thoughts started to form in my head I soon realised that my local stretch of the river Cam gave me the opportunity in abundance for the 'observe and fish' approach. A carp is a carp is a carp and if you attach no more importance to it than that you might find your fishing is a lot easier, at least on the soul. Fish for a legend, a 'known' fish with all its inferred difficulty and you might prejudice your approach and let those 'questions' enter your head. However, unbeknown to me I was indeed fishing for 'known' fish, a Cambridge Legend in fact. Now Bullseye along with its mates 'The Linear' et al have caused quite a stir in Cambridge for some time now. Bullseye (the biggest) has been in the local rag at least twice to my knowledge and they are 'sort after' fish. However where they lived (until they escaped into the 'A' section) was a bit of an obstacle, 'The Backs'. Now I briefly touched on 'the backs' in my previous article so let me elaborate more. In summer it is the busiest stretch of water on the river with literally hundreds of tourists on the water in punts, so thousands every year. It's an area that is enclosed between two locks in the center of town, the first to the south at 'the mill pool' near Queens College and the other to the north of town at Jesus lock. Punts were introduced to Cambridge as pleasure craft in Edwardian times and since then it has become a Cambridge tradition (for tourists mostly of course) to go punting around the backs, under the Mathematical bridge, past the spires of Kings college etc

Imagine if you will dozens of heavy flat low profiled wooden craft of some 6-7 meters long and 1-2 meters wide with half a dozen tourists squeezed in each one. Another guy on the end of the punt has a five meter long solid wooden pole which is heavy and unwieldy tipped with a steel prod. Now to attain momentum they have to quickly and efficiently slide this pole straight down vertically into the river some 6 feet deep and more and then push it down and away and behind to propel the craft along, they also have to use it to steer the craft. Now, in reality they have absolutely no idea how to achieve this and there are hundreds of them, all doing the same thing, shouting, screaming and careering from one side of the river to the other. Falling in (always funny as hell) and generally creating a scene of absolute mayhem, serene scene my arse! Yes you could row your boat down before dusk and grab a few hours but others were doing that and to be perfectly honest I don't like to follow, so I stayed away. So by happy chance here I was going to fish the Cam for what turned out to be some stunning carp that I always wanted to catch. My walks along the river Cam are frequent simply because it's a great place to walk and clear your head. Being an angler though my eyes are never off the water for long and so these trips increased and became an everyday habit of search, bait and observe. I soon spotted the fish and quickly became absorbed by my hunt for them. They responded well to, eating everything I put in front of them and filling me with immense anticipation for the glorious 16th, the start of the river fishing season. It was early May and for three weeks or so I went down every day and put bait into the spots I had chosen using one hell of a lot of bait. On average a kilo or two went in every time I visited but just before the off I starved the swim for twenty-four hours.

At 5.00 am the on June 16th 2011, exactly thirty-one years after I caught my first carp I arrived at the swim, within five minutes I had sorted out my rods and made my first cast, now I should say that the word cast is a misnomer because I was only fishing five feet out from the bank. A dozen baits were sprinkled around it and the rod was propped up on one of my alarms and the swinger attached but before I could get the second rod out of its bag the first rod was off with the tip nicely bent over. I picked up the rod, dis-engaged the bait runner and felt the fish surge on the other end of the line, I knew straight away that it was a lump, slow and powerful. Yet within a few minutes I had it in the back of the net and was gazing down on it with slight shock at just how big it looked. I decided to wait to see what the scales would say, no way was I going to let the thought of my first river thirty enter my head only to be dashed by the unyielding truth of the pointer needle on my Ruben's , so I settled for the thought that it was a big twenty. I think the first of anything is supreme, it rules the nest, and is always remembered. Any repetition of that success is perhaps somewhat muted by it and so of course the moment when a fish goes up on the scales and the pointer winds around and you reach a milestone for the first time is very special indeed. That evening I returned to have another go, the fish were on the spot and feeding confidently, however I was on the river Cam, the local highway for the university and club boat crews to train and race on, it was June 16th the start of 'The Bumps' races and they had a cannon! Next month sees me getting into a regular pattern of bait, observe and fish which enveloped me for the entire summer and produced a few really nice fish along the way