8 August, 2024 | Carp | Angler Blogs | Articles

Andy Bradnock: Carping on the Beach

In Andy Bradnock’s latest article, he details a short campaign to a club water whilst he waits for Frimley to reopen after. Whilst the stock isn’t as impressive as Frimley’s, this little lake with a sea view provided Andy with a suitable challenge – will he find the fish? Read on to find out…

Andy says: 

Carping on the Beach

With Frimley closed for 2 weeks, if I was going to go carp fishing I needed to find a suitable venue.

I hold a club ticket because they have a very special water on their books and as a bonus, they have the fishing rights to numerous other lakes and rivers in Kent. These are all too far from me to allow a proper campaign but, there is a water on the Kent coast that I fished for the first time last year which is a fun interlude.

It sits in the Romney Marshes a stone’s throw from the beach and on my trip last year, I had the lake to myself.

There are no giants in its 8 or so acres from what I can ascertain, there is ‘just’ the one thirty pounder present, a common which has been up to 34lbs in some of the pictures I have seen of it. There has been a whisper of a rumour that a couple of larger fish may have found their way into the lake but, it is such a faint whisper I think it is just hearsay and conjecture.

The trip down is a tortuous 70 mile slog through the Kent countryside, accompanied this time by Snow Patrol blaring from the speakers before pulling into the lake’s car park which houses a lovely blue chemical toilet.

The scene couldn’t have been more contrasting from last year as I had to carefully slot my car into the already overflowing car park.

Suddenly this lake had become super popular and talking to a couple of the anglers on my walk around it would appear this level of angler pressure is the norm so maybe I was just lucky last year with 10 anglers on though, for my normal Sunday/Monday night session it seemed a bit excessive.

Maybe the rumours of giants has some credence!

The main congregation of anglers was focused on the car park bank where every swim was occupied with an expensive giant two-man bivvy usually accompanied by a huge gas bottle and some sort of awning. However, on the more uncomfortable far bank there were 3 swims in a row with only the one angler present who was packing up in the point swim.

The locals may have been playing down the numbers of fish caught but the whole lake had only produced a couple bites over the entire weekend.

I wheeled around to the far bank, parked up and then wandering around between the three swims now available. To get to the far bank I had passed through a narrow gate that was bordered by a Dog Rose. I obviously wobbled on the way through and got tangled up in a plethora of thorns so was deprived of some of my blood.

These sorts of mishaps are always good for Tom, probably the clumsiest man on earth. He always revels in my discomfort when I do something stupid like this.

I took a photo of my bleeding arm to make him happy and then continued looking for signs of carp. The angler that had been in the point swim was now well on his way home to a Sunday dinner so I had pick of the three swims on this section of bank.

After about an hour one poked its nose out to the left of the point swim so I decided that this would be my starting point. The club had just introduced a green dye to the water which made it look a little strange and I had no idea how this would affect the fish. However, with a nice SW wind pushing into my half of the lake and an air pressure of 988mb everything seemed quite ‘carpy’.

For this trip I had finally got my hands on Dynamites new Crab Extract. This is the stuff I stole from Andy Mackie’s van while it was still in the production stage. It smells amazing and is every bit as good as I remember it.

I am in a hugely fortunate position of being able to choose anything from the Dynamite catalogue so added to the crab was my usual Frenzied Hempseed, Belachan Liquid, Shrimp Extract, Fish Gutz, Complex-T pellet and Swim Stim Margin Mix ground bait. I also decided that as the water temperature was now up, mixing some garlic and hemp oil into the mix would increase the smell and particle level in the water column as the oil breaks out of the ground bait and floats to the surface.

As an aside, if you cut the top off the 2.5l particle jars the base makes a perfect bivvy bin so you can stop chucking tea bags into the bushes which drives me mad.

I was fishing at 10.5 wraps into 9ft of water, the lake bed was flat and uniform mainly made up of sticky silt. I found a clean gravely strip at this range big enough for 3 rods.

I don’t normally look for the cleanest areas to put a bait on just somewhere different (ie) silt in a sea of gravel or vice versa. As it was at a comfortable distance this clean area is probably somewhere that anglers have baited for a while so it is kept clean. It could also be a natural feeding area that the fish have cleaned off. Whatever it is there is a reason why it was cleaner than the surrounding lake bed.

A 10l bucket of bait was mixed up with a generous amount of halved and whole boilies added and this was squeezed into 60 big balls.

At Frimley I have been christened Captain Badoosh as the noise the ground bait balls I chuck about make is quite unique and not subtle. I planned to put in for a promotion to at least Colonel after I had finished putting that lot in.

It equates to around 90 large spombs but takes around 20 minutes max to get out.

This lake has a huge bream and tench population as well as plenty of roach and rudd. I cannot see in these circumstances it is possible to over-bait. There is maybe an argument that only using boilies is more selective in lakes with big populations of other species, what people actually mean is make your baiting less attractive so less fish come in to feed.

In my opinion invite everyone to the party and eventually the right one will make a mistake.

With fishing 3 on a spot like I was, it is a scenario that seems to work well. The only caveat I will put on this is it is difficult to keep putting the rods back out after yet another bream especially as most of the action was at night.

I don’t think the carp are overly concerned by bream getting caught but it is difficult to be certain of this. On this lake it doesn’t seem to put the carp off, but there is a healthy population of carp so it could be that one pod of carp is being spooked but another comes round pretty quickly.

During this session it felt like the bream were only there when the carp weren’t, as soon as the carp bites started the bream takes dried up.

I was well organised – baits out, house up and dinner cooked well before dark, allowing me to sit and enjoy the other main reason why I love this lake, the wildlife.

The lake is situated in a sort of nature reserve with lots of deep reed beds spread over the numerous lakes and ponds that pepper the area. This makes it an ideal habitat for large numbers of resident and migratory birds.

To kick things off I was visited by the local shrew and mouse population. The shrews are really cool, the only thing you see is a little streak of fast moving brown fur as they cover the open ground of the swim. They are always on a metabolic knife edge and need to eat almost continuously to stay alive.

The mice on the other hand were brazen to the point of rudeness. I thought the Frimley mice were the most annoying mice I had ever encountered until I met these little buggers. They don’t even knock they come straight into the bivvy and start climbing all over anything that may be even vaguely edible, leaving a trail of tiny turds just to let you know where they have been.

When confronted they are really difficult to scare and just sit looking at you waiting to see if you really want them to leave or are just kidding.

As the evening progresses the nightly sing song starts. This bit I absolutely love.

It starts with Greenfinches which have a buzzing type call. They used to be really common when I was a kid but they are very susceptible to a protozoal infection called Trichomonas that they catch at bird feeders. This decimated the population.

There seemed to be a fair few singing away in the bushes surrounding the lake so the local population looks to be in pretty good health.

I love some of the origin stories behind the words we use in common language. Decimate was a Roman term where a humiliated legion as punishment would be decimated. This involved counting down the line of soldiers and every tenth man would have to be killed by the other nine. It makes people being mean on twitter seem a little tame in comparison.

The far bank housed a number of Greater Whitethroats which have a lovely melodious song that greets the setting sun. Once the light has faded to twilight the Marsh Frogs begin their chorus. They are not native to the UK, a few were released into the Kent countryside and they have managed to survive and spread through the South-East.

They make quite a racket but the final addition to the orchestra drowns out the rest. The Cetti’s warbler happily sings all night with the volume turned up to 11. They are summer migrants that breed in the reed-beds of the South coast – tiny little drab birds really but the amount of noise they produce is un-real. Slowly falling asleep surrounded by this natural cacophony is just about my favourite thing on earth and makes such a contrast to the constant road, rail and aircraft noise we experience at Frimley.

It wasn’t until 01.00 that my Delkim decided that enough natural noise had been experienced and some good old fashioned electronic shouting was required.

The takes on this lake are blistering, full on one-toners so in the middle of the night it is quite the wake-up call.

The resultant mid-double common was quite nice but wouldn’t usually require any more than a quick look in the net then get released. However, after the lighting fiasco I had while doing self takes the week before at Frimley, I had bought a new addition to my lighting system.

So, my latest acquisition was put to the test while I held up my capture to the camera phone. The fox halo system performed admirably and I was happy with the results which, with some practice, I am sure will be refined further.

I got some more practice at 03.00 as the first mirror I have caught from this lake slipped up and fell for a paste wrapped bottom bait. At around 18lb I decided it was the perfect candidate for some more photography practice.

Another two commons were caught over the next hour or so and then after this a bream and tench onslaught for the following few hours meant hardly a minute of the morning didn’t involve me having a rod in hand.

By this stage I was knackered, I had been up most of the night and was desperately in need of sleep.

As the sun climbed into the sky, thankfully the runs dried up and eventually all the action stopped. This was probably due to a combination of all the bait being eaten and the time of day.

I spent most of the day snoozing and trying to keep everything dry in the constant deluge of rain that had decided to camp over this part of Kent for the day. It was at this point that I realised the winter had taken its toll on my ancient Tempest as a constant stream of water was running down the inside wall of my shelter.

This made the local slug population happy and when I woke up later in the day, I was greeted by the sight of hundreds of them performing slug yoga on the inside of my bivvy. I have woken in the past to find a huge orange slug crawling (do slugs crawl?) over my face so at least I was spared a repeat of this experience.

I made a note that I needed to grab some tent proof next week.

The rain finally eased off mid-afternoon so, I set about making up a repeat bucket of bait to be launched into the lake before I settled down to eat some pasta for dinner. That night at dusk the sky to the south was illuminated with parachute flares. They were constantly being launched into the night sky for a few hours. It was either someone playing silly buggers or the Border Force were having issues on the beach with yet another of the summer’s small boat influx.

I didn’t have to wait so long for the first take which came just before 23.00 in the form of a screaming banshee.

This was the largest fish I have caught from the lake at 23lb 9oz so I was more than happy.

The runs kept coming through the night with plenty of bream and two further carp, one common and a lovely looking mid-double fully scaled. The takes from the bream seemed in increase in number through the morning and some of the larger ones were doubles, the last of the action came at around 11.00 and turned out to be a pike neatly hooked in the scissors which looked around 8lb.

I spent the rest of the morning playing with the lakes mallard babies as they had decided that my swim was the best place to wander around causing mischief.

I was again exhausted having been up most of the night so I was trying to make up valiant excuses as to why I was going to be terrible company for my poor wife when I got home.

The lake had one last treat in store for me as I was packing down a Peregrine did a low fly-by down the middle of the lake.

I had loved this session as it was varied and relaxed. The fishing seemed to be a break from the intense need to catch at Frimley where everything seems to be more important. A more relaxed outlook smelling the roses and enjoying being out angling for fish that did what they were supposed to do, turn up, feed, show and act like un-pressured carp.

From what I can work out one other guy caught a couple while I was there while everyone else blanked.

I was the only one who put out any volume of bait, I would suggest that in this instance it really worked and is well worth a try if you find yourself in a similar situation.