5 September, 2023 | Carp | Angler Blogs | Articles

0 Comments

Ian Russell’s Diary August 2023

Ian Russell gives us the run down on another ridiculously busy month of fishing!

Ian says…

Well, August has absolutely shot by for me!

First up was a lovely family holiday in Crete which meant my work had too be crammed into 3x weeks instead of 4 but the holiday was amazing to say the least.

On my return I had a tutorial cancellation so I popped over to W1 North Lake for 24-hours. Now of late my main focus on the North Lake has been the awesome-looking ‘Long Sutton’ which hovers around the 50lb mark, so I try my hardest to position myself in swims that it is known to haunt.

On this visit I managed just that and I had personally seen him here a good few times of late so set up full of confidence. My usual 12mm CompleX-T and XL Sweetcorn approach was applied and back I sat.

It wasn’t too long before a crazy mid-20 common picked up one of the rigs which an hour later was followed by an upper 20 mirror.

The rest of my trip remained quiet and next morning I was off home as I had a shop visit day at Brown’s of Leighton Buzzard. What a fantastic shop this is and the banter with the staff was great! A really lovely day was had by all.

I was then off with Total Carp for my monthly feature to Effingham Carp Lake which I had not previously visited. This turned out to be a really nice little lake but to see how myself and client Neal fared you will need to check out Total Carp…

The Lucy’s Bowl Event over at RK Leisure’s Wraysbury venue was the following weekend and this is an event I really enjoy attending. My good friend Tony Bond had paid yet again a substantial amount of money to fish with me so I was in very good company indeed.

Now although this is also seen as a competitive event we have not treated it that way and look at it in the right way. That being a charity event not a match. That said, when we attended several years ago we some how found ourselves in first position at the presentation ceremony with Tony taking home a rather large cut glass trophy!

Moving on… we were soon set up in a swim known as Round Point and not being familiar with said area I grabbed some info from friends and venue regulars Pete Hurst and Jake Taylor.

We started by applying to both of our areas plenty of 12mm CompleX-T boilies and 6mm CompleX-T pellets before setting the rods to task.

In all fairness we saw very few carp in our area and it was midnight when one of my rods was finally away. After a heavy and very weeded up scrap, a VS linear of 29lb was witnessed by Adrian from the next swim.

The next bite was to be Tony’s and after a tench-like bite he had a 7lb common so we were creeping up the scoreboard.

Mid afternoon (whilst 4 of my granddaughters, son Lee, Debbie and my Hunky friend John Flewin were in attendance) Tony was away again and a 24lb mirror was landed.

Now we heard we were possibly in third place as the South was fishing very slowly.

Social gathering over and we set the rods for our final night.

First light comes and I lose two carp to the weed which would eventually go on to cost us another first place so on my third take I called for the boat and a mid double linear was landed which was closely followed by a low 20 putting us on 96lb and 10oz.

At the presentation Jed Kent came in first with 112lb so you see quite possibly just 1 of those 2 lost carp would have given us another first place but second it was to be.

Tony got to take home another glass trophy and an incredible £53,000 was raised for the cause. Now that is why we do it – absolutely amazing! I shall definitely be in attendance In 2024.

Tight Lines for now folks – Ian Russell