The above words started to mean things around about this time.
By 1983 things were starting to improve. I'd been properly Carping fishing for three whole years by this time and it was by about 1983 that I felt that I was starting to get my head around how to fish Fordwich properly, well 'sort of' anyhow. Our methods had been learned and put into practise, our bait knowledge and rigs had improved and for once things were starting to point in the right direction.
In the close season of '82/83 I decided to buy myself another pair of rods due to my ever growing worry about being able to reach the fish when required. My mate Tony decided to splash out on a pair of the Rod Hutchinson rods that Geoff and I had been using the year prior and when he went to pick the rods up (at Allan Brown's in Hitchen) I went along for the ride and ended up having a natter with the rod builder in the shop who told me about some new blanks he was using. These were big pit Carp rods again but slightly different to the RH's. Like the RH's they were 12 feet long and compound taper but the taper had been modified on these new things. These new rods were slightly stiffer in the middle of the rod, but lighter in weight and more well balanced, the RH's were always a little top heavy I felt. Anyway, I ended up ordering a pair and whilst perhaps not being quite so nice for playing fish on, they could cast further, pretty much due to the lightness I think. They could also handle a two and three quarter to three ounce lead slightly better and I'd say by a combination of these factors that on a calm day when used side by side, that I could get an extra ten to fifteen yards or so by comparison with my RH's. I remember that Geoff didn't like them much and to be honest he was right to, the stiffness did make them less supple than the RH's but there was no arguing as I was definitely casting significantly further with these newer rods. I used them virtually all of the time on Fordwich from thereon but went back to the RH's when long range fishing wasn't such an issue. By this time we were using very light main lines on and off, as light as 6 lb breaking strain in the swims between the Richies and the Baldwin in the weed free years and this never caused us any problems. You had to be manic about keeping the line in good order using such thin monofilament, constantly checking it during and between sessions for any damage. The heavy shock leaders we were using took all of the stick of course, the main line was only under any real pressure when you caught a Carp and often times when fishing at 100+ yards range the pressure put on the line was minimal anyway due to the stretchy nature of the Sylcast nylon we used at the time. I liked Sylcast, it was a bit wiry but it was ultra durable and once you'd given it a stretch the 6 or 7 lb mainlines were using it worked perfectly. It was also cheap enough that it allowed you to change it often too. I would use 7 lb mainline for range fishing in the open parts of Fordwich when the lake was slightly more weedy, on some of the snaggier or close range swims such as the Trees or the Spit I'd then use 10 lb breaking strain line.
Anyway, as it worked out in 1983 I had my best year for the 'ol Carps, taking 24 of them, including a new PB of 25 lb 13 oz which was a really big fish to me at the time, the days of getting half a dozen Fordwich Carps per season were long gone by then. Geoff had then caught the largest of all the Fordwich Carp, a big grey mirror known as Charlie in the autumn of 1983 ... I think she weighed in at 28 lb 5 oz when he caught her, that sounds about right as I sit here now almost forty years later anyway? He caught her off the Corner swim, a swim since re-named as the Killick Gap for some reason? Unfortunately I wasn't with Geoff when he caught Charlie, in fact I don't think I saw Charlie on the bank until about 1984? Charlie was a legendary fish when we started to fish Fordwich, she was always far and away the biggest fish in the lake, well until the middle to late 1980's anyway. We all wanted to catch old Charlie, of all the Fordwich carp she was the jewel in the crown at the time.
Charlie ... 'The' Carp. (UNFINISHED)
Talking about Charlie ... I found an interesting long forgotten bit of info about old Charlie. I can easily imagine the scene which would have been me and Geoff, sitting upstairs in my bedroom/music room, working out how many people had caught Charlie between 1981 when she acquired the name of Charlie, and then became regionally famous, and 1987 when this conflab between Geoff and I took place. We no doubt sat there nattering and then wrote down in this old notepad that I dug out and wrote out all of the captures.
In the 1981/2 season three people caught Charlie ... these were, and assumedly in the order of capture:
Rod Killick at 29 lb 4 oz
Burt Thatcher at 29 lb something in ounces
... then Rod Killick again, at 29 lb 4 oz again.
Then in the 1982/3 season:
Ian Johnstone, at 29 lb 2 oz
Tim Attwood, at 26 lb?
Barry Gardner, at 27 lb +
I am not sure if the above is in chronological order as Tim and Barry's captures were written my me, then I see that Geoff scrawled Ian Johnston's capture alongside. No doubt when I was out of the room, making tea, on the phone or in the loo? If caught at the beginning of the season when in spawn or in late autumn/early winter then this would explain the weight discrepancy.
In the 1983/4 season:
Steve Attwood, at 28 lb 4 oz.
Mark Sturge, at 28 lb 9 oz.
Fred Brown, at 28 lb 4 oz.
Geoff Bowers, at 28 lb 5 oz.
I would assume that Charlie didn't spawn in that year, hence the weights all being so close together.
In the 1984/85 season Charlie then went mad, no doubt due to the boilie becoming so readily available to the fish, and got caught by eleven very lucky human beings, still not any of them being me! This irritated me a bit at the time as I was getting loads of Carp that year but none of them was the much wanted big one. Getting back to the Fordwich bait scene by the middle 1980's everyone (well, except for Tim Attwood) would have been using boliles by this time and it would appear that Charlie had started talking a liking to them.
The weights throughout the '84/85 season veered between 24 at the start and 28 lb at the end (when Mark caught her) and the captors, written in order were: Brian Gaymer, Geoff Hobbs, Vegie Mick, Wing Nut, Geoff Bowers, Gonzo, Tony Philips, Ian Brown, Fireman Ian, Spike and Mark Plank.
In the 1985/6 season we only heard about Charlie getting caught twice, both time by our mates, firstly, Martin Daley (now eight written down) then Kipper, or Martin Hudson as is his real name, at 28 lbs. Still I hadn't caught Charlie ... but ...
In the 1986/7 season I did at long last catch Charlie. She finally fell to my anglery charms in Setember of 1986 when I caught here off the Richies swim at 25 lb 1 oz 'then' a few weeks later during October 1986, this time next door from the Mungs at 27 lb 4oz.
This brings me on to another subject, just how many Carp were there in Fordwich prior to the middle 1980's? We never thought of such things during our early years but as the seasons wore on I started to notice just how many recaptures that I was getting. I was always a little overly cranky about fish recognition, most of the Fordwich anglers had little interest about such things but it was something that always fascinated me. I was always the anorak of our group in this regard, pawing over my own and others people's photos and I ended up getting to know most of the fish within seconds of seeing them ... no doubt this would drive some people barmy but to me it was all part of the Carping game, let's face it, you can learn quite a bit about fish if you know one from the other. It fascinated me as to why some fish would get caught half a dozen times or more every season year in year out whereas others would very rarely ever be seen at all? To me it was very important to recognise the individual fish, in fact the more fish you got to recognise then the more information you'd have at your mental disposal to form certain theory's or conclusions. It also gave you a rough gauge as to the head of fish in the lake alongside allowing you to see what sort of growth spurt the fish were having as the years wore on. We never could get to the bottom of the stocking policy of Fordwich, the information knocking around was often so contradictory that it left you pulling your hair out. One theory as to the origin of the original stocking that did make sense was when someone told us that some of the original stock came from a lake in Dartford, namely Horton Kirby. The fish were either destined for stocking into Horton (from wherever?) but then put into Fordwich 'or' were taken 'out of' Horton and then transferred into Fordwich? I will write this theory out in more detail later on in the Blog. I've written it on the page dealing with Fordwich Lake on page 9.
You had to be careful about using such info gathered about fish stocks. I made a real howler, putting two and two together and coming up with five on one occasion due to having limited knowledge about lakes/heads of fish and growth of the said fish. Once I got a rough count as to the head of fish in Fordwich I wrongly thought that as there were so many that no doubt Fordwich might never produce any very large Carp. My gauge for this was Yateley, another set of lakes I fished in Surrey ... it wasn't a good yardstick for any comparison to Fordwich I was later to learn. Now Yateley was a complex of lakes ranging from about 15 - 20 acres down to just a few acres. Now the common denominator of the lakes there that held forty pound plus Carp was that they all held very few fish. The Car Park lake held perhaps less than ten Carp, the Pad lake just five Carp and the North Pit about seven perhaps eight Carp in total? Using Yateley as a template I always used to think that there were just too many Carp in Fordwich to produce any forties. Hands up ... I was wrong! Quite why I didn't factor in what I knew about lakes such as Redmire, a massive oversight on my part was that. Redmire is tiny, as small as one of the Bays of Fordwich, has a decent head of Carp and had already produced fish of over forty and one of over fifty pounds. It took time for these Carp to grow so large, by the mid to late 1980's the Fordwich fish were just too young to reach their peak growth/weight. We live and learn.
The original Carp in Fordwich were stocked in the early 1970's, there were quite a few Common Carp but most of the 'originals' were small mirror Carp and mostly of the grey lightly scaled Italian strain type. There were also a few Galician types too, as in longer, skinnier brown scaly mirrors but very few as all. A few small grey Italian type, almost scale less mirrors were then stocked in the early 1980's and thereafter a few commons and scaly mirrors (of some unknown strain to my eye) were introduced in the middle 1980's, though once again very few. I would hazard a guess, an educated guess bear in mind, that there were between 200 and 250 or so decent sized Carp in Fordwich in the middle 1980's. Again I would 'guess' there were about 150 double figure plus mirrors and far less common's, perhaps 30 - 50 ish? It was far harder to gauge with the 'commons' for the obvious reason, many of them looked roughly about the same. In fact I only got to properly know six of the Fordwich common's, one was a short fat fish with bulging eyes known as 'Popeye', then there was a large triangular looking twenty pounder which we saw on the bank in 1981 and never ever again thereafter, a small skinny common with a deformed mouth (it had no top lip) another small grey coloured common, which I referred to as the 'silver common', another low double that had a few white scales on one flank and another mid double which had a patch of scales missing on one flank just above the lateral line toward the tail end of the fish. It goes to show how much effort I put into learning all of this as I can still bring these fish to mind sitting here thirty five years later on. There would be a few other commons that could be identified with a little more effort, but the six I just reeled off from memory I could spot within one second of seeing them in the landing net anyway. As I say, this sort of nonsense was very much my thing, I was a bit of an anorak about such trivia. I am of course a birder, you have to be able to recognise minor detail to identify birds ... of course I then went on to trying to identifying all of the 2000+ UK moths, a whole new kettle of fish was that ... if that's not a bad metaphor? Anyway, I digress ...
A rare scaly 'original stock' Fordwich carp, this one a low double taken off the Richies in 1981. These Galician type fish were very few and far between with only a mere handful present amongst 200 ish Italian strain mirrors and lesser amounts of Common Carp. Of these long thin scaly Carp, only one weighed any more than mid doubles back then, a low to mid twenty we referred to as She Lookalike and that fish rarely ever got caught at all. It's odd to see a bivvy on the Little Richies, the lake must have been packed for someone to move in there.
This is one of 6 - 10 (??) very small 4 - 5 lb mirrors stocked in the early 1980's. Many of them were awfully similar looking, almost pea in a pod type things.
By the middle 1980's a few of these very scaly fish had been introduced. They ranged between about 4 - 6 lb when we used to see them getting caught initially but here this one had reached over 9 lbs by 1985. I did get the odd one over double figures by 1986/87, they were certainly packing on the weight by then. In the early to middle 1980's there was a stock pond behind the Baldwin swim. They dammed off a small arm of the lake and out a few very small Carp in, some of less than one pound. It could be that these very un-Fordwichy looking golden scaled Carp were actually some of those fish? That is me by the way ... an explanation as to the silly hair will follow.
Away Days
Vauxhall Lake, July 1983 ... a rare trip out of the house for the Mitchell 300's I see.
Vauxhall Lake, July 1983.
In 1983 we started to travel around a bit more, not too far though, always staying within the Kent boundary, during these middle years of my Carp angling anyway. In July, Geoff and I did a couple of exploratory days fishing on Vauxhall lake, again I really can't think why? Perhaps Geoff just fancied a bit of easier Carping but as I remember it the fishing wasn't all that easy anyway and the Carp were small things too. I can't remember what Geoff caught during these couple of visits, as I never used to take detailed notes of other peoples captures unfortunately, but I see that I caught 4 small Carp, the largest of which was just into double figures. My notes tell me that I used Bacon Grill as bait (a form of higher quality Luncheon Meat) and we fished an area of the Lake known as Snake Island ... I can't remember seeing any snakes, just some small Carp? There was one funny thing that occurred during those trips to Vauxhall. One morning we arrived to see another angler already on the bank, I recognised him and said to Geoff "Here, look over there, it's that weird ugly ginger kid from school" ... I'm not sure if Geoff even saw him as I write, though he may have done? Anyway, this weird ugly ginger kid from school was in fact Bamber, a bloke who went on to be a good mate in time, also a member of the Premier Baits crew in the later 1980's when Jock left. I'm not dissing Bamber here, he was under no illusions as to his looks, he realised he was no looker did Bamber. To illustrate, one day we were at work and the phone rings, it was some saleswoman who was doing her best to sell Bamber something, something he didn't want! The conversation went on and on for ages but Bamber stood his ground before this woman resorted to her final tactic, namely flirting. To show just how Bamber realised he was no babe magnet, I was following the conversation standing alongside him and was listening in and this saleswoman said how much she'd like to meet up with Bamber, she was prepared to use any sort of skulduggery by this point and Bamber's reply was "you wouldn't say that if you saw what I look like" ... it was classic Bamber. It still makes me chuckle even now. Anyway ... back to the fishing ... I digress ... again!
My entire haul of Vauxhall Carp from July 1983 ... the largest was the top mirror at 10 lb 11 oz. There's more meat on the fish than there is on the angler eh?
Brooklands, July 1983.
Our third away day site visit of 1983 came when Tony, Alex and I deciding to all crawl into Tony's small grey (twin webber carbed) Fiat and take the hour's drive up to Dartford to fish on Brooklands. Once again the reasoning for such a trip is beyond me as I sit here now? Of course Brooklands was one of the more famous sites for Carp Angling and as you could fish it on a day ticket system we went and tried it, so no doubt there was no more to it than that? We arrived at first light, parked the car, wandered along the first bit of bank, soon finding a spot where all three of us could fish pretty much together, lobbed out two rods each in rather aimless fashion (I see I took my staple bait of red/evaporated milk and ice cream milk protein boilies) and sat back, not knowing anything about the lake or expecting any action. As was the way, even though I was fishing blind, I managed to get the only take and soon had a mid/upper double mirror in the net. Okay, once again I'd been the fortunate one to get the fish but this time there was a bit of payback as after unhooking the Carp it went berserk on the bank as I unhooked it and ended up falling back into the lake! The area we ended up fishing had no run off area so to speak, there was a fence right behind me and so the fish went out of the net and back into the water. Tony and Alex were both very sympathetic after seeing that I was far from happy having lost this fish before it could be weighed and photographed and they only fell about laughing for about the next five minutes or so. Me, I never even smirked.
The Crusher sessions, August and October 1983.
In the close season of '82/83 Tony, Alex and I had popped out for a look at the Crusher, a large working gravel pit near to the coast at Hythe now known as Nichol's Quarry. Word had got back to us about a few Carp being caught there, so on one blisteringly hot day we popped out for a recce to see if it warranted any further attention. My memories of that visit will be forever etched into my memory and much of what went on is so out of order that it's unprintable here ... what I can say is that we went to the local Pub on the way there (where all sorts of things occurred) and once on the lake, Tony pushed Al into the water off of a high bank ... and that was just the start of things, it got awfully silly afterwards, just a normal day out with Tony and Alex. Anyway, even though the Lake was nothing to look at, being pretty much a large hole in the ground at the time and we saw no signs of any Carp at all, we bought a season ticket and that August Tony and I decided to try and fish it for the first time. We did a weekend session and I got three Carp, two small commons of 4 lb 12 oz and 5 lb 3 oz plus a nice scaly 11 lb mirror. I see I was fishing with my usual 1983 red milk protein pop up's flavoured with evaporated milk and ice cream.
11 lb 10 oz, the Crusher, Hythe, August 1983. The largest of three Carp taken during that first trip.
My second session at the Crusher came in the same month, August 1983. At this particular time I had a job working for a Civil Engineering* company in Deal and the new job they gave us was a three night stint digging out one of the old Nuclear reactors at Dungeness Power Station. I remember this particular three nights work very well and with good reason too, as once on the site we were forced to have a medical and before we were able to access the place where the reactor was, we were were then all fitted with small clip on Geiger counters! The area was still radioactive ... it all sounds a bit mad to me sitting here now but this is what the job was. The money was good (perhaps double rate for night-work?) so we all agreed to do it, I'd been working on and off with this gang of blokes for some time, so it was a group decision to do this job at all. We were told to inform the on-site head honcho if our radioactivity detectors reached a certain level and I well remember the furore when one of the blokes noticed that the danger number was not only reached but well exceeded ... a rather excitable group of us then downed tools and told the man in charge and he didn't even bat an eyelid!! Looking back I think he did it as a bit of a dark humoured gag? Part of my reason for relating this short tale (other than the fact that it just popped into my mind as I wrote) was to explain the fact that I was only fishing during the daytime for this session. As soon as I knew that we'd be driving right past the front gates of the Crusher on our drive to work between Deal and Dungeness I formed a cunning plan ... I wondered if I could stay on the Crusher by day, get picked up in the evening and after the night-shift get dropped back at the lake? I then had a natter with the van driver and he didn't mind, so I ended up working through the nights, leaving my bivvy set up and all my gear on the lakeside, then get dropped back off at the lake in the morning, cast out, have a wash (in the lake) and make some grub and get a bit of shuteye before the next shift. I caught two more Carp doing this, another small common (on Maple Peas I see) and another scaly mirror of 11 lb on my red evaporated milk pop up's. On the second day I put all of my gear into the back of the works van, did my last night-shift and then got driven home, so thinking about it I'd have only fished for two full days.
*an overly pretentious title for a firm who employed me as a dog's body labourer.
11 lb 8 oz, the Crusher, Hythe, August 1983.
One of the many small common's frequenting the gravel pit at the time.
My third and last trip to the Crusher came in October 1983. On this occasion Tony and I were joined by Alex, we fished the weekend and only had one run which came to Mr Jammy so and so (ie me) and ended with me netting a 13 lb mirror. The Carp we caught there were very different to those we caught at Fordwich, nice scaly fish. I wonder how large these Carp would be now? Hmmm??? I did re-join for the 1984/5 season but didn't once fish the lake as Geoff wasn't interested in the Crusher and by the following year I'd be mainly fishing with him by then. I went back to the Crusher around the year 2000. On this particular winters day I decided to cycle from Folkestone down to Dungeness Bird Reserve. I got the train to Folkestone of course, it's a 100 mile round trip to Dunge from my house and on the way past I stopped off as there were some Waxwings hanging around the roadside trees that winter. The lake looked much the same as it did almost two decades earlier when we fished there, a large, open, desolate gravel pit ...
On reflection the Crusher was an interesting place to fish mainly due to it being so different from any other lake I ever tried any Carp fishing. One nice thing about it was you rarely saw any other anglers so there was never any pressure to hang around trying to get the precise swim you wanted. It was always pressurised fishing Fordwich during the early years and inevitably you'd turn up and all the best spots were taken. Okay we got round this by about 1984/5 by booking swims or sending one of our battalion of spies (as in our local mates) to find out when whoever was fishing the spot you wanted was leaving. Even this was hard work, it was pretty full on at times as you had to be in near constant contact with what was going on around the lake if you wanted to plan anything. There was none of this on the Crusher, the whole lake was one big open swim. That said, I soon stopped fishing there ... and because Fordwich was miles better ...
13 lb 4 oz, the Crusher, Hythe, October 1984. A fish taken on my last ever visit to the lake. The use of three rods were allowed on the Crusher, a rather superb novelty to us at the time where two rods was the norm on our local pits and rivers.
Fordwich '83
That year at Fordwich, as I touched upon at the start of this bit of bludgeony Bloggy Boredom, well the dots were starting to join up inside of my head. I'd got to know the lake pretty well by this time, I had a mental map of the individual swims, got to grips with many of the moods associated with the weather and just as importantly, had the gear able to fish the lake more properly.
The one chink in my armour in '83 would be my bait and looking back it was odd to see just how close I was (or we were, any Baits were always mutual decisions discussed between Geoff and I) to arriving at a fantastic bait in 1983 but rather stupidly didn't use it. I found amongst the many bait recipes in my old journals a base mix/attracter combo that would have worked far better than any I had used up till this time. I assume I must have tried it out, not got any takes and then given up on it far too early, preferring to stick to my milk protein/baby food recipe that had been providing me with the occasional fish every now and then. Little did we know that had we baited up a little more heavily there was a Carpy killing to be made. It wasn't until 1984 or 1985 that we managed (as a collective group of numerous Carp anglers I mean) to get the lake's Carp preoccupied with boilies I think, up to that time I'd guess that there just weren't enough boilies being put into the lake to compete with the various other food sources the Carp were eating? By the middle years of the 1980's I'd say that the Carp were actively starting to look for boilies as there were plenty of loose baits to be found, or at least that how it appeared to me. By 1985 lots of fishmeal boilies were being used as free baits for extended periods of time and it came across as if the Carp were almost addicted to them. Anyway, that near miss 1983 killer bait recipe was ...
4 oz Casein
4 oz Lactalbumin
4 oz White Fish Meal
4 oz Herring Meal
2 oz Trout Fry Crumb
2 oz Codlivine
2 oz Wheat Gluten
1 oz Egg Albumin
12 ml Cod Liver Oil
3 ml Pilchard Oil
Had I used this boilie mix instead of my milk proteins I'd have had almost as good a bait as it was possible to have for Fordwich. I must have used it for a short period of time, caught nothing and gone back to what I knew had caught me some Carp in the past. What a berk.
While I'm here waffling about bait mixes I may as well write down what I was using in 1983, this or a very rough versions of this:
8 oz Casein
2 oz Lactalbumin
4 oz Complan (a powdered high protein milk food source drink)
4 oz Cow and Gate premium Baby Food. (or Geoff Kemp's Vitamealo, a powdered Calf Milk Feed)
2 oz Wheatgerm
2 oz Wheat Gluten
I also had another protein mix that I moved onto during the latter period of 1983 and it was so effective that I stuck with a rough form of it for much of 1984/5 too before we switched to fishmeal/sluis/fish oils, this was:
4 oz Casein
2 oz Lactalbumin
2 oz Wheatgerm
10 oz Sluis bird food
1/2 oz vitamin supplement
1 Teaspoon Liver Extract per six egg mix.
1 Teaspoon of MSG per six egg mix.
My main flavour for 1983 was Geoff Kemp's Evaporated Milk and Ice Cream, in fact I see I used this exclusively throughout the 1983 season. I also coloured the baits, mostly red initially but also a bright turquoise blue later on in the year too. I also started making the free baits larger once I'd moved onto the blue bird food mix, just so that they would catapult out further into the lake. One of the problems that I had with the Milk Protein base was that the boilies were a bit too light for the long range catapulting. The bird food boilies were far more stodgy (for want of a better word) and the extra weight would help them to absolutely fly out of a high powered hunting catapult.
During my on-line watching of recent YouTube videos I see that very few people make their own bait anymore. In our day the only machine rolled pre-made boilies available were Richworth's and although they caught Carp, they would have not been very good on Fordwich if only because the boilies were far too small. The Richworth's were a very poor quality base mix nutritionally too, using lots of semolina and overly powerful 1000:1 alcohol based flavours. Carp will eat pretty much anything of course but we always believed it was better to use long term baits made from a decent food source, the thinking being that once the Carp get a taste of these high food source baits (rather than merely high protein) that these baits would just work for longer periods of time seeing as Carp pretty much instinctively know what to eat by design. When you give this sort of process a little thought, every bait introduced in to the water has to compete or even out compete with any other food sources, natural or otherwise. There are many benefits to using fishmeal mixes, the high fatty acid content of the oil attractant alone both drawing the fish in due to the way it dissipates into the water also helping the fish to grow and mend old wounds etc. Some people used to overthink about oil based attractors and used to emulsify the oils but this was very, very silly as it was counteractive and stopped the oil floating up off the bottom and drawing in fish cruising in mid-water, in fact a large bed of bait spread over an area of the lake would create a curtain of rising oil that could often be seen from the bankside. I well remember at times being able to see a flat spot created by the oil slick on water with a slight chop to the surface ... you just knew that any Carp swimming over your bait in whatever depth of water just couldn't fail to be alerted by this 'curtain' of oil. Well, this was the thinking at the time anyway, I doubt whether this has changed.
I drew out this rough joke ridden diagram for the very first Premier Baits catalogue in 1988/9, a version of which actually went to print in the 1990 bait catalogue I think? Can you just imagine what the professional printing people thought when they got these sorts of rough notes for the bait catalogues we set out back then? No, nor can I. I drew this out whilst in conference with Geoff to illustrate the above theory as to why certain baits drew in fish whereas others often didn't, and although half drawn/written in jest, it is in fact quite informative in retrospect. It was our way of going about things at the time and it worked too, the Carping public loved it. The winter and protein bait bits make me laugh ... I'd forgotten that this even existed until my recent delve into my old notepads.
Amongst the various pages of scribble, often stuff thrown about as rough ideas or tangents of the current thinking at the time, I then found a few pages from the opposite end of the scale of complexity from the previous diagram that I did, this one regarding some overly complex bait theory written out by my old mate, the professor Malcolm Berry. Yeah, it went straight over my head too! There was just no need to approach bait from this angle, Carp bait theory was a relatively simple thing. The objectives were to just make bait that you were able to get into the right spot (in our day by catapult) was hard enough to deter smaller fish, was water resistant enough to stay put for over over 36/48 hours and was of a high enough food source to attract, feed and compete with the fishes natural food source. Once you understood this simplistic concept then it was pretty much all that was required of you to know.
The massively increased catch rates once lots of boilies were introduced to the water proved something was afoot anyhow. It took us till 1985 to learn all this mind you, at the time every bait mix and ingredient used was always an experiment of sorts. Bait making for a long session or to make lots to stick and stash in the freezer was often a bit of a chore. At times, say if we had a week session planned when we would need hundreds of boilies so we would organise get togethers in each others kitchens and help each other out. It got to the point where we would be buying boxes of 144 eggs and using the whole lot! The entire house used to smell of the powerful flavourings or even worse Fish meal, and I hate to think just how many little round balls of paste we'd roll by hand then boil ... it must have been thousands on occasion? Of interest, I found a 51 pound dry mix in one of my old diaries, when you think about it that's almost a sack of spuds in dry powdered mix alone. And in this diary I'd worked out a equation based round how ever many baits per egg that I could make and it worked out at an astounding ten thousand and fifty boilies with that amount of dry mix. All in all the equation worked out at 134 x 4 egg mixes that I would need 536 eggs! Now that's an awful lot of eggs ... of course ten thousand plus is an awful lot of boilies too. The life of a Carp angler at the time was all rather odd, time consuming too. We were fortunate to have our own bait company as that amount of mix would cost a small fortune ... we just took whatever we needed at the time so it cost us nothing in real terms, anything we did use would have been tax deductible.
Some '83 Carps
As the fishing was improving year upon year for me, in 1983 and I managed to get a few better quality fish out of Fordwich including four of over twenty pounds. This might not sound all that good nowadays but believe me it was good going for us lot at the time. As the years rolled on the Carp continued to pile on the weight but in the very early 1980's catching pretty much any Carp out of Fordwich was still hard work and always worthy of note.
One of four 'twenties' that I took from Fordwich in 1983, this one a new PB of 25 lb 13 oz taken off the Little Richies on a Liver Extract boilie in September 1983.
My largest ever Fordwich Common and the second biggest that I ever even saw come out of the lake at all. It weighed 19 lb 4 oz and I caught it off the Corner swim [since re-named as the Killick Gap] in October of 1983. Is that a slight smirk I detect on my usually deadpan photo face? I would have been very pleased of course, any Carp at this stage of my life was big deal but I preferred to keep how I felt away from the camera lens where fishing photos were concerned. I still hate having my photo taken to this day.
22 lb 3oz, the Corner Swim, Fordwich, October 1983. This fish gave me the right run around. After hooking it about 100 yards out it felt as if I'd hooked a whale and for ages it dragged me up and down the lake. The real fun started when I got the fish into the margins and when I first spotted it in the water I saw those two large scales on the flank and mistook the fish for Charlie, which in October back then may well have been pushing twenty eight/nine plus pounds. Thinking it was Charlie, I panicked and of all the swims to catch it from the Corner back then was one of the worst as you were forced to net the fish after guiding it through a narrow gap of reeds which extended out about ten yards or so into the lake. Anyway, everything calmed down once I eventually netted it, I immediately spotted my error of judgement as to the fishes identity and no doubt would have been slightly miffed that it wasn't the big Fordwich fish of the day. I caught this fish a few times again over the years and it was another that acquired a name via Ian Brown, who called it Scaly. It looked far larger than 22 lbs on the bank too ...
A rare sighting of She Lookalike, Fordwich's most mysterious and enigmatic Carp back then as it very rarely ever got caught in our day. I caught her (or him?) off the Mound [now Woodmans] in November of 1983 and it weighed in at 23 lb 3 oz, a very large Carp at the time. I only ever saw this fish on one other occasion and even then not on the bank. Whilst fishing off the Island swim in the early part of the 1985/6 season there were lots of Carp spawning there and right underneath the bank, about twenty feet off my nose and I saw this fish clearly swimming along in full on spawning mode amongst a small group of smaller Carp.
My last twenty of 1983, taken in December during a south-westerly gale. The top fish weighed 21 lb 14 oz and the lower one was 17 lb 4 oz, I took both fish after dark so had them both sacked up in the morning for the photo shoot.
Big squeaky bearded things?
The big event of 1983 was making a new best mate. To expand on this tale a little more; by 1982/83 I was fishing with Geoff more and more often. Geoff was getting more and more Carp oriented, was obsessed with baits and it was around this rough year that the embryo of Premier baits started to emerge, inside Geoff's head not mine. Around this time we were buying all of our bait from Geoff Kemp and during a visit to Geoff's (Kemp's) house in Essex, Geoff had a brainwave ... I remember him saying to me as we drove home "D'you know what, we could do that?" "What, sell Carp bait?" says me, "yeah" says Geoff, he meant it too. But that's another story. To be quite honest at the time I thought he was crackers. Oh how wrong can a man be.
Anyhow, back at the 'new best mate' theme ... by this time, being a friendly chap as I was, I always had a gathering of people around me whilst fishing. Geoff used to slaughter me and refer to them as "Phil's mungs" (I'm laughing as I write) as whilst correct I mean what could I do about it? Chase them away? Throw rocks at them? Okay it was murder at times, you might want a light afternoon, pre carp feeding time siesta or rustle yourself up a cooked meal and inevitably as soon as people heard (or assumed) I was around, then they'd head down for an often VERY long chat. Some people sat with me for hours, hence 'Phils Mungs'. One day, already set up on Fordwich deeps, some lads showed up and we decided to hit the Fordwich arms drinking parlour. As it was getting dark at the time, I reeled in my rods, and toodled off down for what's known locally as a nice light ale or two ... any more than two/three/four and I was in trouble, well, I was inside the top four or five worlds worst ever drinkists. I used to practice plenty but never got any good at it I'm afraid. Anyhoo, on this particular night, after the pub kicked out and by then in pitch black darkness, I wobbled back to my bivvy, at the time set up on the very furthest part of the lake along the deeps, when my heart dropped ... someone had moved in next to me. He must have arrived well after dark which was odd, I had that whole 300 yard stretch of bank to myself when I left, and being right at the far end of the lake, miles from the car park, I felt ultra safe leaving my gear there. As my heart skipped a beat on first view, it soon got even worse. As I staggered closer and closer to this new bivvy and on hearing my size twelves clugging their way in the darkness, a huge bearded shape emerged from within this rogue bivvy ... then I heard a voice, of a timbre only audible to trained sheepdogs and skinny long-haired Carp anglers "excuse me mate" squeaked the bearded beast, "is that your gear up there? I had to chase a few no gooders away from your bivvy earlier" although 'it' sounded friendly enough, the huge bearded, squeaky voiced shape looked a little intimidating on a dark night at the wrong end of a lake miles from anyone. I wasn't worried, "he's far too fat to catch me" my semi sloshed inner brain thought, so I felt safe enough. But what about these 'erberts that had potentially ransacked my bivvy ... my brain changed tac, my heart missed another beat and we both wandered up to my gear, expecting the worst. Anyhow, on wandering the thirty/forty further yards, I arrived to find my gear as I'd left it and I let out an enormous Phew!! After thanking this bloke, I cast out, set up for the night and we got nattering ... and er ... nattering ... and er nattering ... "oh you like rock music do you?" "ah, your a Carpist are you?" natter natter natter, on and on ... eventually the sun started to emerge on the horizon, we'd been nattering all night long!! We were the closest of mates from that night onward and went on to become the UK's top beer balancing act, I'd fall over after five whereas this geezer was just getting started at 10 pints ... we'd formed some weird sort of alcoholic equilibrium! He introduced me to bands such as Gentle Giant and PFM, had many tales of the early days of Carping (being from North Kent he'd fished all over from the late 60's throughout the 70's) he'd even been a bouncer on the doors in a London club where the Groundhogs, Eno's Roxy Music and PFM etc etc had played. It was fascinating. We also shared a rather madcap sense of humour but also had rather serious opinions about pretty much every subject under the sun ... there was never a dull moment.
To tie in the 'Phils Mungs' part of this chapter, I later learned that the intruders were indeed a gang of my Mungs! One of them, a young bloke with ears like a rutting male African Elephant (instantly nicknamed as 'wingnut' as soon as Locky set eyes on him) showed up the following day, telling me that him and a few mates had shown up but couldn't find me. Of course they then turned up the next day too ... and the day after that ... and the day after that etc etc. That's just how it was with my gang of ... er um ... mungs.
Oh ... as to this this dudes name? Oooh er ... um?? Oh, what was it now ... Dick Slack or something? It's been so long ... was it Dot Slough?? NO, Dave Locke, that's the one. More about him later.
I can scarcely believe that I only have just TWO photos with Locky in them, above R - L: Geoff, Ben (Jock's son) then Jock in the white coat with the huge lump that is Locky on the far right. An enormous, Viking of a man, the head of a wild male Moose, huge beard for stashing pipes and loose change, four feet across the shoulders, a huge gut used for vast gallons of beer and tea retention with 'unfortunately' the legs of an overly tall, emaciated skinny eight year old schoolgirl. It was any wonder his legs held him up straight, but then again there were times when they didn't of course (hee hee) like when wobbling back from the Fordwich arms in the muddy darkness, giggling insanely like the skinny schoolgirl that he had bashed up back in the day, stealing her legs which he then glued and screwed on to his immense lower half. When he whistled, as he often did, his brain would rattle around inside that huge cranium like an old biscuit tin with the lid on, inside of which was a table tennis ball. All this is totally scientifically accurate y'know? I know as I both thought it up and wrote it. That's proof enough in my world.
Many years later Lockey moved on to pastures news, away from Thanet Thicky Land to another land flowing with milk, honey, Carp Lakes, boats and Pubs. We used to write to each other quite often and his letters were hysterical. Anyhow ... whilst hunting through my shoe-box of ex Carpy long lost things of old, I found loads of his letters, I'm so glad I didn't chuck them out even though in truth I only read this one back as to be quite honest, it all got a bit too weird if that makes sense? Here we find Monsieur Locke writing back after being hospitalised in about 1990. I can't remember the whole story but think that possibly he got his vast head stuck inside a cask of ale mid guzzle and whilst calling for help, his high pitched squeaky voice hit such highs that his voice-box burst through his throat ... something along those lines anyway? It was eight octaves higher than a soprano's high C if memory serves correct? His drawings were well worth a look ... well they say a picture paints a thousand words don't they? Those 'slight hormone imbalance' women's shoes in the diagram had me if fits mate! Both then and now. You were such a silly old sausage now weren't you? And then again so was I of course.
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