Page 5 of 14: 1981, 1982 plus Bait innovations and Chilham Castle.

1981/2 extra added boredom plus the CCG transforms into the all new and exciting CT20

This part will deal with two of what turned out to be transitional years of my Carp angling journey ...

1981 and 1982 proved to be a year of change of my personal angling saga. It was a period where we were forced to change pretty much all of our thinking about rigs and baits, we also saw the need and honed our abilities to cast long distances and to use a catapult at range so as to groundbait some better areas of the lake where more of the Carps hung out most of the time. In essence, apart from the extra experience we'd gained, by 1982 especially we also had at our disposal better rods able to cope with heavier leads as well as us realising that we needed to move toward using heavy shock leader and lighter lines and of course moving from soft paste baits onto boilies. Year upon year we got to know the ways of the lake better too plus another part of this learning curve was by it leading the way to us considering Carping on other more far flung waters for the first time, which we did in 1983. We'll start here resuming the chronological year upon year order with what happened in 1981 ... 

1981 ... or year two of proper full on Carp fishing for me after my 'playing around with it period' of 1979. The usual early fishing days template was still being employed at this time and I'd spent much of the previous winter taking part in lots of Pike and Eel fishing till the new season and the Carping, kicked off in June. We did no proper winter Carping back at this time. Okay, we'd read articles about winter fishing and knew that cold weather captures were possible although being far harder to come by than in the warm weather angling seasons, but I quite liked a weekends Piking during my early days, so this is what I did at the time. That said, it would be around this point in time that the solely Carping itch started to nag at me, progressively become more captivating or manic, soon becoming far and away the main thing for me. We were also learning what NOT to do by this time too, as in not being led down the garden path by old out of date theories about Carp and how and when you could and couldn't catch them. As well as the 'you can't catch Carp in cold weather' nonsense still kicking around in the early 1980's. There were also lots of other old wives tales about Carp fishing still in vogue at the time "they are the most clever of all fish" was one, and other tripe included such things as 'they will never eat the same bait twice' or 'they are frightened of hooks' ... you'd have thought you were dealing with trying to out-think Albert Einstein here rather than outwit some silly smelly old fish. Inevitably we rather stupidly initially allowed some of this nonsense to affect us in those early days, we were so surrounded by this out of date rubbish that unfortunately some of it stuck and filled us with paranoia which often led to many, many wrong decisions. As the penny slowly started to drop during the early 80's with regard to lots of this nonsense, I well remember semi arguments with various stick in the mud minded 'old style' anglers even about things as obvious as the hair rig in the later years. A few still couldn't get their tiny stubborn brains around the fact that Carp had no idea what a hook was, especially the smaller hooks we had access to by the middle 1980's once these lightweight chemically sharpened hooks became available to buy in our local tackle shops. No, no, no, in their minds Carp were scared of hooks and they had the indisputable evidence of eight Carp caught over the past four seasons as proof that if you hid your hook inside your bait you'd catch more Carp. It was laughable the amount of nonsense mopped up by the immovable sponge like brains of these types and it was made to look all the more silly seeing that other anglers using these new rigs and baits were catching far more than they were. The fact that often times Carp were sucking in all sorts of small sticks and bits of weed stem 'all of the time' did little to divert them away what from they'd had work for them once in a blue moon in the past. We were all gullible of course, just some of us were less gullible than many others. There was just no getting through to some of the more stubborn types amongst the old guard. 

The CT20 circa 1981

I had forgotten about this. One day about a year ago now as I write, I was out birding and ran into Craig Reynolds. We got nattering like we do and he reminded me about the new Carp group we all married up to known as the CT20. The whole thing had completely slipped my mind when I wrote my initial Carp fishing Blog retrospective. Once again, well, as I remember it anyway, it wasn't really a real thing but just an extension of people we all met up with on Fordwich as time wore along the year prior. The CT part of the name would refer to our local Postcode and the rest would have been about twenty members incorporated into this fake group. There were seven of us in the original 1980 group (the CCG) but who else got involved I couldn't say for certain? Of the other thirteen or so members I would hazard a guess that this would have included the lads from Whitstable, Chod, Gapson, Nigel (?) Gapson and possibly a younger lad called Tim ... also Geoff (Bowers) but who else? There were other Fordwich carp anglers we got pally with ... Geoff Hobbs was one but I can't remember who else? 

The Bowers years .... 

I think Geoff was around more and more by this time in my angling life? When I first got to know Geoff as a mate, he worked long hours as a butcher and therefore wasn't able to do as much Carp fishing as he'd have liked. It wasn't as though he could even get the full weekends off as he often had to work on Saturday mornings too and I could tell it was driving him potty. Pretty soon he'd escape the butchery trade and we'd be able to do some longer sessions together. When we did fish together in those early days he'd often show up with a bag full of meat and we'd eat like kings. I remember he used to make a mean curry too, it was all part of the fishing thing, sat in the bivvy cooking a curry or eating a fillet steak sandwich. In 1981 both Craig and Rich were still fishing but this was a transitional time for them in their lives too and within a year or so they'd both say goodbye to the angling and Geoff and I would thereafter team up as each other's main Carp fishing buddies. Geoff wasn't taken by the Pike angling meaning that during this period he'd pretty much hang up his rods once the winter came and do more socialising. Tony Philips and I used to do odd winter Piking sessions though, so little changed in real terms for me. 

Although a fairly new best mate at this time, I had in fact known Geoff for a long time prior to this, since our schooldays in fact. He was in the year above me at school and I used to see him around, I think we might have played football at dinner times before we knew each other properly too? It would have been in the late 1970's or early 1980's that Geoff moved house to near to where I lived, in fact our back gardens almost overlapped and I still maintain that this is why we went on to be such great mates, the fact that we lived so close together I mean. Had I lived any further away then he'd have been far too lazy to walk there! He used to make me laugh as when he learned to drive he used to drive his van to the shops which were just a two minute walk away from his front door. Sorry Geoff but it still makes me chuckle to this day. I'd been friends with Geoff's younger cousin for years too, meaning that we'd rubbed shoulders on occasion due to this too. Anyway, one day I had a knock at the door and it was Geoff. I asked him in, we had a game of darts and a knock about on the 6' x 3' foot snooker table I had set up in the spare room and after that there was no getting rid of him, he became a near constant feature, sitting in his chair in this spare room, demanding cups of tea, dribbling on the floor, making me fall around laughing amid the background noise of rock music alongside hours of in depth football and Carp talk. There was never a dull moment when Geoff was around. 

Anyway ... back to the fishing.

Here is is, old Bowers wedged in his chair in my old sitting/music room. He he would sit for many, many hours, day in day out, chattering away, keeping me generally amused with his various tales and anecdotes. His favourite activities back then included demanding tea (often) and chewing anything within arms reach that would fit into his gob. I wish I still had one of those guitars in the case over his left hand shoulder, it would be worth ten plus grand nowadays, a 60's or perhaps early 70's Les Paul. 

I found a few of Geoff's tea demands like the above in my old notepads. Imagine the scene - I inevitably had music blaring out near constantly and when we weren't talking Geoff would often drift off into a trance and in-between chewing on bits of paper, old batteries, pens and pencils etc he'd sit there doodling in my notepads. Often was the time I'd hear him shout 'Here Phil' in an excited tone of voice as if something incredible had happened and I'd look up to see him holding up this sort of thing in front of his face. He'd be forced to shout as the music was often ... er ... quiet loud ... 

I can't find too much fishing info regarding 1981 for whatever reason? My memory is vague enough as it is, so not being able to find my written records for this period assuming that I have any, so this means that I wont have too much to write about the 1981/82 season. I did catch my first twenty pound Carp in '81, I remember that alright. I'd set up on the Barnes in July and I'm pretty sure that I was fishing with Rich as I can see what looks like my old bivouac in the back of shot of the photos taken on the day of that Carp capture, I think that I sold my old canvass bivvy to Rich when I upgraded to a lightweight Barnes nylon bivvy before the 1980/81 season started and there it is in the photo below. At some point of that session I had a take on a lump of Rose flavoured Trout Pellet paste cast through a small gap between some Islands (or the shallow top of a 'right to left' running gravel bar) and it caused me all sorts of hell trying to get the fish back over the shallow bar and onto my side of these islands into what was also some very weedy water. Once in the deep margin we could see it was a large Carp and once netted I was elated. We assumed it would be over twenty pounds and once on the scales we were proved correct, it weighed in at 20 lb 14 oz. It was very hard to get twenty pound plus Carp out of Fordwich at the time, I see via the annual records from that year that Fordwich produced far less that twenty twenty plus Carp in total all year long in 1981. Not that I knew it at the time but that same Carp went on to be one of the more famous of the Fordwich fish too.

My first ever twenty pound Carp, 20 lb 14 oz taken off the Barnes in July of 1981. I do love my mishog deadpan photo faces ... I think I was just trying to appear cool? I caught this Carp on a Rose flavoured lump of Trout Pellet paste and whilst the fish was unknown to me at the time, it was in fact one that acquired the name of Muscles in future seasons due to it always giving a good account of itself once hooked. Ian Brown named the fish on this occasion, not me. I caught old Muscles four times over the years, it was always over twenty pounds and the largest I ever caught her at was 24 lb 10 oz in September of 1984. She weighed in at over 26 lbs by 1987. 

The big event of the 1981/82 season came one day when Rich and I were fishing off the Barnes swim, I'd guess it was early in the season, perhaps June or July of 1982? We were fishing side by side and Rich hooked this Carp and as I remember it the fish snagged itself in some heavy weed. There were two weed filled shallow bars separating two deeper gullies to get the fish across from this swim and it was quite a common occurrence for fish to get at least temporarily weeded up in the shallower water. I am also pretty certain that someone went into the water and swam out to free the fish (I might have this muddled with another capture?) and what I do remember with sharp clarity is that when Rich got the fish in the deep margin we could all see it was a large chunky common. We preferred to catch commons in the very early days as there were less of them in the lake than mirrors, so the rarity/novelty value made us admire them all the more. Once netted, we all gasped as it was a monster to us at the time and on my new set of salter dial scales it weighed 20 lb 12 oz, the largest common ever caught out of Fordwich at that time. Soon the word spread and one of the other more experienced Carp anglers showed up and re-weighed the fish on his 'superior' scales just to recheck but the weight was, as well all knew seeing as my scales were almost brand new at the time, in fact accurate. So my old mate had finally caught the first ever twenty pound plus common to come out of Fordwich. I'm not sure what the previous biggest Fordwich common was in '81 but back in 1979 I found documented evidence that the official C&DAA Common Carp record was just 14 lb 8 oz in 1977. To give a bit of background as to the size of the Carp in Fordwich in my day, I did lots of fishing on Fordwich, until the autumn of 1987 in fact, and this fish remained the only twenty pound Fordwich common that I ever saw on the bank, my personal best Fordwich commons weighed in at two of 18+ and another at 19 lb 4 oz. 

The only photo that I have of Rich's big common of 20 lb 12 oz taken off the Barnes early in the summer of 1982. It was a C&DAA record common at the time and it remained the largest Common Carp that I ever saw on the bank at Fordwich. Other thought provoking bits of note from the above image include Rich not having any head, those Rock group badges, a Motorhead T-Shirt and the various Derri Boots on view. Well, to start, in the other photos that I took Rich's head was included, just in this one we took one (intentionally) solely as a close up of the fish. The other few photos containing 'a head' I must have given to Rich at the time. The dude on the left with the flash green wellies is our mate Craig Reynolds, he's holding the fin up like people used to do with Perch, an odd thing looking back though perfectly acceptable at the time. The badges and T-Shirt were mine and Richs thing, we used to go to lots of Rock gigs at the time and Rich still does, even though he longer fishes and hasn't since fairly soon after he caught this fish. As for the Derri boots, well they were a bit of a thing at the time. Branded in all of the Angling mags as waterproof and hard wearing, we know nothing numpties all bought them (except for the clued up footwear genius, Craig) and paid for our stupidity as they not only were NOWHERE NEAR waterproof but when worn in any wet mud, you'd also had to run the gauntlet of them sliding around all over the shop and leaving you slipping about like Bambi on ice due to the soles being almost flat as a pancake. In fact my mate Tony, after a particularly 'busy' night at the pub, once ski'd back to his bivvy, 100's of yards all the way along the wet and muddy main Fordwich path wearing his skid-pad Derri Boots, hollering at the top of his alcohol filled head in the darkness for all to hear, a repeated "it's only the old Franz Klammers!!" For the uninitiated, Franz Klammer was a world  famous Austrian top class downhill skier at the time. It was hilarious, hence it coming to mind here thirty five years later. Another ridiculous story relevant to the above came recently when I made mention to Craig about those green wellies. We were out (at Pegwell in the early winter of 2020) at the time, and Craig pointed down, and there lo and behold were the very same wellies forty years on. He's still wearing them! They made things to last back then of course but even so, he's been wearing those very same wellington boots on and off I might add, for nigh on four decades!! 

My old dairies inform me that we were still using paste baits and running ledger rigs for the start of this season at least, that's just how it was done back then. We may have been playing around with hair rigs/boilies by the end of 1981 or more probably in 1982, after the release of Kevin Maddock's book Carp Fever in 1981 and the hair rig became common knowledge. We experimented with it for a while as it took a bit of getting used to did hair rigs and fixed lead rigs. We found out pretty soon that it was a superior method  old running leger style rigs as a bloke called Rod Killick was using it on the lake and catching lots of fish ... it wouldn't be long before the light-bulb went off in our heads and we had our own personal little eureka moment about such things. 

1981 Pike and Eels. 

I bagged a fair few double figure Pike in 1981 but didn't manage to get any over twenty pounds. I see by looking through my old backlog of photos that I did a bit of Piking with Craig and Tony Philips but also both Dave and Alex Stewart too. It was rare to do any Piking with Dave and Al hence me making mention of it.

My largest Pike of the 1981/82 season, 19 lb 4 oz taken from Westbere Canal in February or March 1982. A lovely marked Pike and the largest I ever caught from the Canal. 

A low double from the Canal, once again taken in the late autumn or early winter of 1981.

Another double from Westbere Canal, probably taken in November of 1981? More notable for me are those dreaded green Derri Boots, my old German army issue coat and the hi tech Star Trek version of the Optonic extension speaker box. I see that I was using the 1 3/4 lb TC rods I bought from Mick Wilkinson, a rare trip out of the rod holdall for those was that, one of the very few times that I ever cast them out at all? If I ever used them for any Carp fishing I honestly can't recall it? By this time I had bought myself another pair of Carp rods for use on Fordwich but even there were then ungraded for the following seasons use as the Carp rod technology improved year upon year.

My personal best Eel, a monster of 5 lb 11 oz, accidentally caught whilst Piking on Westbere deeps probably in October or November of 1981. It was early on in the Pike season anyhow. I also had another large Eel of 4 lb 12 oz around this time from Fordwich Deeps too but can't lay my hands on the photos. This would have been a Canterbury and District AA record Eel at the time but I never submitted it, I was never one for the limelight. 

A rare photo from this general time period ... here we have Gonzo with a Pike ... well almost a whole Gonzo anyway? 

1982 (re-do this bit - till Chilham) 

By 1982 we had a bit of a breakthrough on the gear front. The rods we were using during our early years of Carping just weren't up to the job at all and needed an upgrade if were to start fishing Fordwich properly. Up till this time our very early Carp rods were made from fibreglass as decent large water Carbon fibre Carp rods just weren't available until the early 1980's, so we were forced to use these horrid, floppy fibre glass things. They were unresponsive and being 'floppy' were just no good for long range casting at all, and one thing that was starting to dawn on us as our Carp careers moved ever onward was that at times is that you needed to have the option of being able to cast out as far as was possible if you were to catch very many Carp on certain areas of Fordwich such as the Richies, Mungs and Mound especially. I already had acquired a pair of carbon fibre Carp rods, bought as blanks and built at home in 1980/8, but they were far from ideal for the full on range stuff but then in 1981 we started to hear word about a rod designed by Rod Hutchinson, one of the top Carp anglers of the day. Now here is where I get slightly confused once again, as I can't remember whether or not the shop we bought these rods from was in Hitchen or Turnford? I am 99% sure that we bought the Rod Hutchinson rods from a shop in Hitchen (in Hertfordshire) I think we bought our rods after this in the mid 1980's from a place called Simpson's of Turnford? Anyway, it's irrelevant of course, I'm just waffling and rather oddly, mainly to myself. Anyhow, I remember Geoff raving about these rods he'd seen, so we checked them out ... and he was right to lavish such high praise upon them as they were exactly what we needed for Fordwich, being a serious upgrade on what we'd been using up till then. These weren't just some cheesy sales pitch items having some famous Carp anglers name nailed onto them, they actually worked, they did what it said on the tin and they allowed us to catch more fish. Carp rods in the older days were often just a beefed up extension of the many ledger rods used back then and most of them were between about eleven feet in length (if you were lucky) and mostly of about a 2 lb test curve. These new rods designed by Hutchinson were twelve feet long, they were made from a Bruce and Walker compound taper blank and had a test curve of around 2 lbs 10 oz I believe? I may be wrong? The thinking behind these rods was spot on, the compound taper was great for playing fish and when casting the beef of the middle taper allowed for easy smooth casting. At the time everyone advocated using fast taper rods for long range fishing but these stiffer types of rods had their drawbacks as they were too rigid and just felt horrible, both in the hand and when playing fish as well. One other great thing about using these longer Carp rods was how easy it was to play fish due to the way you could control the line, the extra length meant that these RH's were just far better. I think that Hutchinson was fishing on Savay at the time and some of those Colne Valley pits were notorious for having some wicked shallow gravel bars littered with sharp line cutting swan and razor mussels so the extra length of these twelve footers had another bonus if required, as in keeping more line out of the water. They could also could handle a two and half ounce lead and when used in conjunction with an 18 lb shock leader and 7 lb main line could throw a bait over 120 yards given the right conditions. Geoff went on and on about these rods, so we ended up having a day out, driving to the shop and buying a pair each and we weren't disappointed once we used them. In fact I ended up buying a third rod off of one of the other Carp Anglers fishing on Fordwich, a bloke named Fred Brown, remember him anyone?

Above: a 12 lb 14 oz mirror taken from Fordwich Deeps in August of 1982 and below it, one of my old original cork handled Rod Hutchinson rods. We chose the cork over the usual metal gated reel holder and plastic moulded handle as these just felt better in the hand. Unlike most of the cheap rods around at the time, the cork used by the shop in Hitchin were of top quality and once the reels were seated properly they never came away. I must have taken this photo and I'm reasonably certain that the person in the top right is my old mate Steve Horne. That Carp is the same fish I caught two years prior off the Easterns in August of 1980 when it weighed 12 lb 13 oz.

Our trial and error (mainly error) baits choices in '82 were also branching out a little by this time. We were playing around with boilies exclusively by this time, the old paste baits were out. However, we were only just coming to terms with the new fangled hair rigs, an essential rig for using boilies as it always looked wrong did side-hooking a boilie. Hang on, rewind, I see that I did in fact play about with using some paste baits at the start of that season. According to my notes this was the year that I bought some of Duncan Kay's Slyme baits, the dry mix looked okay but once mixed with eggs it formed an awful sticky gooh of a paste bait and though I caught two Fordwich Carp on this muck, it was far from being any sort of long term bait solution. The fact that I even bought those bags of bait was no doubt more out of desperation or perhaps curiosity raised after reading about captures made using the bait via the angling press of the day. I tried two types of Duncan Kay's Slyme bait in 1980 or '81, one of the Red Slyme the other Wood Slyme and I caught both of my Fordwich Carp on the Red Slyme. At some time in 1982 we finally had access at long last to a decent supplier of Carp bait. Geoff Kemp had set up his own Bait Company in Essex by the early 1980's and used to sell it from home, running the business out of a rather large garden shed as I remember it. We used to send off for our dry mix and flavours initially but once Geoff got the bait bug we'd take a drive up in his van and pick the bait up off Kempy direct. It was seeing Geoff Kemp's home business set up that gave Geoff the idea to try doing it ourselves in time. Within a few years my spare room was full of stinking sacks of bait and bottles of flavourings and I can well remember the excitement of when we got our first 56 gallon barrel of fish oil delivered. An enormous Low Loader Lorry pulled up outside of my house, we rolled off the large green barrel into my back garden which is where it stayed until we'd used the whole barrel up between us. It was like winning the pools tracking down and purchasing that first barrel of fish oil. Soon we'd have premises and order many barrels of oil, but that was a few years yet in the future, 1986/7 perhaps when we ran the bait business from home, the later 1980's being the time we had our own bait factory? Hmmm?? Again I'm possibly getting muddled. 

Anyway, in August of '82 I read that I had settled on a milk protein mix made from the dry ingredients we bought from Geoff Kemp and decided to stick with it for the rest of the season ... the 20 ounce mix was:

4 oz Casein

4 oz Lactalbumin

4 oz Calcium Caseinate

2 oz Soya Flour

2 oz Wheat Gluten

4 oz Vitamealo

I also used the hair rig from this moment onward, there would be no large hooks and paste baits for me from now on.

A 14 lb 2 oz mirror taken off the Killick point in September of '82, one of the first handful of Carp that I ever caught using a hair rig. Up till then I was only playing around with the hair rig and had caught almost all of my Carp on side-hooked pastes and boilies. This was also the first time that I caught this well known fish, one that I caught myself quite a few times and saw other people get too. That crescent shaped scale near to the tail was a dead giveaway for identification.

A couple of rare winter Carp taken in that 1982/83 season, both from two separate sessions in March of 1983. The fish on the left was my largest of the entire season, at just 19 lb 4 oz. Twenty pound plus Carp were still very hard to get out of Fordwich at the time. The fish on the right is Voodoo Mask, so named as it had an African Face Mask shaped set of scales on its flank - see below:

Voodoo Mask - note the African face mask patterns along those linear scales. Click on photo to enlarge it if need be? 

My largest Pike of the '82/83 winter period was this 19 lb 2 oz specimen taken from Westbere Deeps. 

Chilham Castle (re-write Wall repetition) 

Two pro shots of Chilham castle, the grounds were huge and beautiful. The red brick castle in the foreground is the newer one built in 1616, the grey one behind it in the top of the two images is very old, built in the 1100's I believe. I did look it up for inclusion here but immediately forgot.

One of very few of my photos of Chilham Castle lake, what a really wonderful little secluded place it was.

I first had a try at fishing on the small ornamental lake within the grounds of Chilham Castle in 1982. Word got to us that this two or three acre lake was packed to the rafters with many small but easy to catch Carp. We were told that the original stock were of proper wild Carp but there had been some newer stocked fish, something I will touch upon later. 

The Castle lake was a place we never took in any way seriously and visited purely to get the rod bent, it was always good fun mind you. Back in the early 1980's and unlike now, there were no easy Carp venues locally and whilst it proved ultra exciting when we first visited the lake the novelty soon wore off. I fished there right up till 1990, probably making around twenty odd sessions in total 'every now and again' sessions during those allotted years and my visits tilted towards winter visits only as my Carp angling journey wore on.  In time a syndicate was set up and we only then got permission to fish there at night, it was day only initially and the tickets available prior to the syndicate were quite expensive as I remember it? We rarely ever did any night sessions though toward the end of my Carp fishing days I do remember doing a couple of full weekend winter sessions with Bamber. All of the other visits would have been for a daytime fishing session only. 

Although of an appalling quality, the above photo was one of the most thought provoking to me when I re-found it amongst a pile of two decade old unseen photos a year or so ago now. I have no clue who took it but I would hazard a guess that it was snapped by Jim Dean? The fishing on Chilham could get very intense once the fish started feeding and you'd often get spells where the takes would come thick and fast. The entire water was really shallow but once you waded out past the margins the silt was incredibly deep seeing as 300 plus years of dead leaves had rotted into this one time ornamental pond. The lake surrounded by thick woodland and had never ever been dredged back then. 

Another appalling image of a very odd looking thing, almost Koi x Wildie? The Ever Ready Torch brought back many old buried memories - it was about as much good at shedding any light as a damp match was held up in drizzle.

The lake set at the bottom of a valley in the Castle grounds was a lovely place to fish. For one thing we always had to book the lake meaning that we had the entire place to ourselves and being at the bottom of a steep valley leading up to the old Castle and being surrounded by a high ancient brick wall and heavy woodland the lake was often wind free too. It was also very shallow and of a uniform depth after you cast beyond the sloped margins. The water was silty and therefore coloured, being almost black and weed free and the bottom was very silty. It was full of these small Wildie type common Carp eager to throw themselves onto the hook using pretty much any sort of bait or method. I used to quite like float fishing with a match rod on Chilham, it was a good bit of fun anyway, you could get half a dozen to ten or more fish on a good day and a six or seven pound wildie on a float rod in two feet of water was explosive stuff! Possibly in 1983 one of our mates (Jim) had a chat with whoever it was that ran the lake and ended up getting permission to set up the small syndicate already mentioned in the above and after that you could also fish nights should you so wish. I only ever did night sessions there right at the end of my time of fishing, even then very rarely and only ever during the winter when I fancied escaping the house and putting a bend in a rod. As I say, those Carp would eat anything, from sweetcorn or boilies fished on the bottom to Chum Mixers fished on the top. On odd thing about the lake at Chilham castle was that it only held Carp, there were no other species of fish at all, not even eels. With the Castle grounds being tightly walled off it actually stopped any rogue eels escaping the river and migrating overland into the lake as they do on many other pits.

The only two double figure that I ever caught from Chilham castle were the top two common's of 10 lbs something then 11 lb 2 oz seen above taken in February and March of 1989 respectively. The bottom fish is a rare Chilham Castle mirror of 8 lbs caught in 1989. Almost all of the Carp in the lake were Commons at the time. 

The lake had a funny atmosphere at night. The Castle grounds were huge, originally medieval but then rebuilt in 17th century. The gardens were lovely, originally designed by Capability Brown and the entire estate was completely walled off, a high brick wall meaning that once you were in and through the locked gates you'd rarely see anybody. That said, the grounds were a bit creepy. I had no worries about fishing at night on my own anywhere, I never got spooked, well not until I fished Chilham at night. It was all nonsense of course but I did get a little creeped out by Chilham Castle once or twice. In truth the Lake itself needed a bit of work done on it, the silt must have been a foot deep in places and there were almost 400 years worth of fallen trees and branches around some of the margins. I had an odd sighting there one day. I was fishing from the Island when I heard a splash to my right. I craned my neck round to see 'something' very small doggy paddling across the surface of the water. It eventually made it to dry land and I was surprised to see that once it crawled out of the wet stuff it was in fact a Grey Squirrel ... the splosh I'd heard was it falling out of a large overhanging Oak tree into the lake. They are tiny when the fur is wet, minuscule by comparison with the usual dry fluffy version. 

Another view of Chilham Castle lake.

Above: In amongst my piles of old fishing junk I found my Chilham Castle permit, hand scrawled by one Mr. James Dean.