This is old footage that I recently found and thought I would share.
Me and Karl fished the specimen lake at Rycroft Fisheries, Castle Donington, for 24 hours. We are both keen carp and specimen anglers, but we don’t devote as much time to the sport as we would like. On this session we both had high hopes. It was my first time on the lake and heard it was a hard water. Also my twin brother Craig came to spectate and our friend Gareth was there that night, and has luck would have it, I was the only one to hear a screaming reel. We set our bivvies up an hour before dark and there was no sign of life in the lake. We had a few drinks and cooked a steak supper on the burner and made our way to bed. At exactly midnight my Fox Micron screamed like a bitch and i soon had a chunky 12lb mirror on the bank courtesy of a slice of Peperami fire stick. I was buzzing because no one had caught anything since our arrival. I had my picture taken with the chunk in the pitch black, and settled back down in my bivvy. No action was seen at all through to the late hours of the next morning. By chance i wandered up the lake and spoke to a man who had more knowledge of the water. He told me that the big ones prefer small single baits popped up off the bottom. I thanked him for his advice but was not too excited. I got back to my peg and made a korda fluoro IQ hooklink with a korda long shank size 12 on the buisness end, with a single nutrabaits pineapple popup sprayed with the matching flavour spray. I placed this about two foot away from the far bank in three feet of water hoping the strangers advice would payoff. And exactly midday in the pouring rain my reel screamed away. The fight was awesome and lasted a good twenty minutes or so. I knew it was the biggest fish I had ever hooked so i asked Karl to land it. It turned out to be a 22 3/4lb prestine common.
