Farm pond carping

I can't remember if I read it or heard it or even where I read or heard it, but the phrase has stayed with me: "The English countryside is less a place than an idea." Whoever it was who first made the observation is, in my opinion, bang on the money. Not just an idea but an ideal, and within the ideal lies, for me, another ideal, that of the farm pond. Of all the places that it's possible to catch carp, my favourite, is a genuine farm pond on a working farm. The carp don't have to be big (in such venues they rarely are- a double is still a big fish and a mid double a monster) but there's something almost magical about a small body of water full of carp that are the progeny of their forefathers who were first stocked into their agrarian setting years ago in simpler times. It was to such a pond that my son and I set off for today, for a few hours of mid- April carp bothering activity.

We were accompanied by a friend of my son's who had never previously been fishing, and so the pond we selected was chosen not only for its pleasing surroundings, but also because the carp of this particular lake are notably fecund, and many years of succesful spawning have not led (as they probably should have done) to the farmer thinning out the stocks, and so the fish exist in the lake in permanently hungry abundance, with the result that we could almost guarantee that his angling duck would be broken several times over during the course of a short morning session.

We opted to fish two rods between the three of us to ensure that there always be one of either myself or my son able to act as coach-cum-ghillie for his pal. One rod was fished on the Method, with the other a lighter set-up utilising a 3BB porcupine quill float and a centre-pin reel. The conditions were challenging while the fishing, as anticipated, was not. The wind howled and whistled and whipped accross the pond, but the three of us were soon steadily catching, and by the time we decided to call stumps, we had probably brought something in the region of forty carp to the bank. Sweetcorn had proved the fish's downfall on the float, while a small hair-rigged Robin Red pellet had brought success on the Method.

In all honesty, the fishing on the pond is, although compensated for by the attractive setting, too easy to retain the interest for long of an experienced angler, unless he or she is one of those irritating types who insists on counting every fish and shouting out regular updates with each one landed. "Fifty four, fifty five .... oooh that's number fifty six", the self-aggrandising and voluble angler sadly unaware that no-one else is in the remotest bit interested in their accumulating tally. 

We retreated to the welcome warmth of the car, and although I suspect we have failed to recruit my son's friend to the regular "brotherhood of the angle" (otherwise known as the ranks of the addicted) all three of us had enjoyed a peaceful and pleasurable morning in a quintessentially English pastoral environment, and in our modern world of loudly competing voices, volatile echo chambers, and tensions between nations, such peace is to be prized.