Ten, Twenties and Thirties
Paul Holroyd

Straight away, let’s establish my credentials as a specimen hunter; bugger all, zilch, not a lot. I haven’t even caught a twenty-pound carp, never caught a barbel and rarely go fishing more than twice a month due to family commitments. So why am I writing this? Mainly due to the fact there are still only a few anglers who spend much time fishing for them despite the claims that catfish were going to be the fish of the nineties. So sit back in a comfortable chair and let me tell you a story.

Before 1990 I was the usual wanabee carp angler. I was based at RAF Brize Norton in those days, and spent my time between Horseshoe Lake when it was still a day ticket water, Roughgrounds the small triangular lake on the other side of the road from Horseshoe and also the Linch Hill complex. Roughgrounds had around 400 carp in, mainly low doubles and singles. In about 1989 the carp were moved from Roughgrounds into Christchurch Lake on the Linch Hill complex. It became instantly a very easy carp water where you could catch up to ten fish a day, unlike today where it contains forties who have wised up considerably. So I was happy enough buying bags of Ritchworth frozen mini boilies (Honey Yucatan and Salmon were my two favourites) and heading off there. In the winter I would experiment with a bit of pike fishing on the lake and I caught a few jacks to 7lb.
In the winter of 1990 I was talked into fishing with a pike angling friend of mine to a club lake nearby; a gravel pit called Newlands Lake in the Stanton Harcourt area. I found an overflow from the small lake next door pouring out flood water from an overflow pipe into the main lake. I legered a popped up mini mackerel in the fast flowing water and sat back to await results. Twenty minutes later I noticed the rod tip nodding up and down but the bite alarm was not sounding and no line was being taken, being a complete novice, I picked up the rod straight away and struck, which probably came as a bit of a shock to the giant female pike who was busy taste testing the bait at the time! Unfortunately for her she powered off into the middle of the lake without expelling the bait and a few minutes later she ended up in the net, all 33lb 2oz of her! My mate Gary photographed me with the pike, I guess I should have been worried when he said “I’m on 26 now I thought this was a 24 film, must be a 36 film”. Yes, the film wasn’t wound on (although I do have a photo of the one pounder I caught later and photographed with my 110 compact!) So there I was with a huge pike to my name and no photo, which as you know means you might as well have not caught the fish in the first place. However, that fish turned me into a specimen hunter and the sky was the limit.

Come the summer and the lure of easy carp had palled, and I really didn’t want to get into the specimen carp world as secrecy and group baiting was the name of the game at the time and I was a lonesome angler with little spare money, so what was I going to do? Well it was around this time that I saw an advert for a CCG meeting at Wolvercote on the outskirts of Oxford, so I went along and saw lots of pictures of these impressive catfish things and heard tales of battles lasting over half an hour. I was hooked! The nearest catfish water to me was Vauxhall’s pit at Stanton Harcourt, which was around 12 acres and as far as I knew only contained a few catfish. The next nearest was Claydon Middle Lake, the home of British catfishing, and a sociable little estate lake stuffed with fish. That’ll do me, I thought, an easy water, I’ll catch one of those and kick start my specimen hunting again.

So anyway, eighteen visits later and I still hadn’t caught one! I saw lots on the bank and netted some for other anglers but my perseverance didn’t seem to be producing results. I was finishing work at five, arriving at the lake by six and fishing until dusk, working on the common assumption that last knockings were the best time to be there. Eventually, however it was a baking hot Sunday at around 3 in the afternoon when I finally got a run and played and landed a 22lb 4oz catfish (1) on a large lump of liver, much to the disgust of Rob Hales (slim in those days, like me) and friends, who were fishing in the next swim, still he did take the photos for me. I caught a few doubles later that season and I caught another scraper twenty on a smelt at the start of the next season (June, remember the closed season?) from what had been an area of dried mud the previous year. Feeling like I was starting to get a grip on this catfishing lark, I bought a ticket for Vauxhall’s Pit and tried there. On my third visit I was told by a bailiff about a twelve foot deep weed free channel on the Windrush bank, so I free lined a sardine out about three rod lengths and lo and behold at one in the morning along came a beautiful dark green catfish of 18lb 10oz who scoffed the sardine and ended up on the bank for its troubles, a new venue record, chuffed? I almost bought a round. Looking back at that one it was just as well that I had no idea just how hard the water was otherwise I wouldn’t have fished it. Many an angler spent blank seasons on that water after the catfish. Also that season I joined a CCG Fish-in at Jones Pit near Leighton Buzzard, although I blanked I fell in love with the water and at the start of the next season I bought a Leisure Sport ticket (as RMC used to be known) and spent a lot of time exploring this new venue, this was in June 1993. The main features on the lake were the two small islands but the swims covering these always seem to be occupied so I settled for a nearby swim on the car park bank, Jones Pit is a sandpit with very little weed growth apart from the margins so I dumped three pints of red maggots in the margin and fished a bunch of popped up worms over the top. Result: A 25lb 10oz brown coloured catfish (2). I fished Jones again later in July and managed to get the Mudhole swim covering the rear of the island, after plumbing around I found a depression in the sand and chucked out a semi fixed bunch of popped up worms. Result: A 27lb 13oz catfish and new venue record to boot! I just sat up all night with the fish in the catfish tube, panicking slightly every time it got too lively, fearing it was going to escape before I could get any daylight photos (flashback to the giant pike).

Things were happening around this time that influenced my fishing; I was posted to the middle of Norfolk. Not one of the centres of catfishing, so I had to confine myself to occasional sorties to catfish lakes, one of which was Houchins Reservoir near Colchester in Essex. This water had some doubles and a known big catfish that had been caught in eel nets in Ranworth Broad and transferred to the reservoir by the NRA but had not yet been caught. Well, when your lucks in, your lucks in, as they say. I joined Colchester Angling Preservation Society in 1995 and visited the fishery in late July. The next morning saw me with three catfish on the bank including the big one at 30lb 12oz (3). The successful tactics were fishing the windward bank and putting out a big carpet of squid at the bottom of the drop off, with a small piece on the hook. The second rod succeeded using a small live bait perch, in fact at one point during the night I had two catfish on at the same time, something I don’t think will ever happen again. I blanked the second night and never went back again.

The next season I was tipped off about Naseby reservoir in Northamptonshire on the A14 about five miles from the start of the M6, a ninety acre water which had produced some catfish captures in the past few seasons. I spent a few days there in August 1996, tactics were catching some of the prolific bait sized roach (if you could feed off the vast shoals of carp!) and placing them on a live bait rig, popping them in a bucket of water and rowing them out in an inflatable boat (cost £16) to the target area and dropping them over the side. By now you’ve probably got the idea, yes, a new venue record of 34lb exactly (4), on the third night, the battle of Naseby was over and the victor moved on.

My local catfish water was Yew Tree Lake at Homersfield; it’s now controlled by Penge angling who also control the neighbouring Waveney Valley Lakes complex. When Yew Tree first started, it was run by Norman Simmons of Homersfield Lake fame with the assistance of Nigel Coram the bailiff. It was a small lake of a couple of acres of which one acre was made up of islands. There were only nine swims on the whole lake, Numbers nine and four were the best swims, one and seven were okay and the others tended to be a struggle. There was one large catfish of 45/55lb and lots of doubles (is it the big one from Homersfield Lake? I’ll let you make your own mind up on that as they always denied it). To catch the big one you had to fish peg nine and fire lots of boilies to the point of the island then wait a few days until it hooked itself. Unfortunately it was always the long stay carp anglers on that peg so I never did catch the big one but a couple of my friends did. I did however catch lots of doubles until I was able to say with some certainty that there were no twenties in the lake and it wasn’t until my third season there (June 2000) that I finally caught a cat of 24lb 4oz (5) when they had piled on some weight.

White Acres, the well-known fishing holiday centre in Cornwall, was another venue I targeted; to do it I booked a caravan for the week for the family and myself in August 1999. During the day I played the family dad and allowed myself to be ripped off by all Cornwall’s major tourist attractions, but in the evening I would abandon the wife and kids in the camp clubhouse and disappear down to Pats Pool, fish all night and reappear in the morning with warm croissants from the shop for breakfast. You’d have thought she’d have been happy with that but I’ve been threatened with divorce if I ever take them to a mobile home park again! As it was I thought I had blown it when I woke up on the final morning to find the lake bathed in daylight and mist rising off the water and still no sign of a catfish, I was in the process of rolling up my sleeping bag when the Delkim sounded, initially I thought it was the travel alarm clock going off, but it turned out to be a 27lb 10oz catfish (6) trying to leg it from catfish corner with my bait, I even got a plastic cup for best (and only) catfish of the week for that, which my wife insists on hiding behind the curtains if we have visitors.

I had visited Jimmy’s Lake in Essex a few times and had caught every time but never managed to catch any of the big ones, on one of my visits I heard of Cobblers Mead (now called Woody’s) which is a much larger and cheaper lake situated just round the corner from Jimmy’s which had a few original catfish in from way back and a couple of hundred small cats which were just making double figures at that time. In August 2000 I booked a few days off and went for a recce, I started off in peg 19 which is in the corner of the lake and has a little bay leading off it which looked good. The first night I had a single and a double figure catfish and a three pound eel (it produced an eight pound eel later in the season), the next morning I moved to peg 14 which had a large overhanging tree to the right of the peg, I caught a couple of small roach which went out as baits near the tree and then sat back to read a book and enjoy the sunshine, at ten in the morning I had a fast run on one of the roach which when hooked went absolutely wild, obviously a catfish, I played it carefully for over quarter of an hour before I had the chance to net it, 36lbs 5oz (7), a new personal best and venue record.

The previous couple of seasons I had been experimenting on the catfish lake at Northey Park near Peterborough with a ‘James Alexander Dumbell Rig’ which is basically an elongated dumbbell float with the mainline running through the middle. It has a free running 3oz lead on one side and the hook length swivel pushed into soft silicone on the other, this allowed the bait to be presented very close to the surface and gave it the freedom to swim around a large area. When the catfish legged it with the bait, the resistance of the large polystyrene eggs being dragged under made it lightly hook the catfish, it was very rare to lose a fish on it (see Keith’s article in the last Whiskers). I caught a couple of doubles on this rig from Northey. The next time I used this rig was in July 1999 at Lakeside Fishery at Onehouse near Stowmarket in Suffolk, it is a two acre water with only two cats in it; a thirty and a forty. It’s a very popular water for junior carp anglers and is very noisy and busy. I was there for one night only and in the early hours had a run on one of the rods, it was the thirty at 33lbs 4oz (8), whilst I was having the photos taken in the morning the forgotten second rod screamed off, but by the time I had carefully put down the thirty and legged it for the rod it had managed to remove the bait from the hook, was it the forty? I prefer to think it was an ambitious carp!

The next season I thought why not try the CCG’s own syndicate water, Crackers Meadow, lots of big catfish (and some big tench as well) so off I went up to Ringstead, found the lake and chucked in two chunks of mackerel attached to hooks (I’d bought the mackerel from Tesco’s on the way up), that night it rained constantly and didn’t stop till daybreak, I was busy making the first coffee of the day when the left hand rod was away and after a short scrap a catfish of 25lb 6oz (9) was in the net. By this stage I was on nine different catfish of over 20lb from nine different waters and was now living near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, so I decided to return to the original home of British catfishing - Leighton Buzzard Angling Club waters, to try for the tenth, Rackley Hills night fishing is controlled by a syndicate, so that left Tiddenfoot, a water I’d always wanted to fish. In July 2001 I found myself setting up the rods on the grass hill opposite the deep bank, there were only four of us fishing the lake due to the high water levels and the fact that gypsies were camping on one side of the lake, for baits I used carpets of squid pieces in the margins on one rod and live baits on the second rod. The first night saw me miss a couple of runs on the live baits but managed to connect with a five pound tench caught on squid! The second night I again missed a run so I pulled in the rods and swapped the large thick wire hooks I was experimenting with and went back to the old faithful Cox and Rawle Uptide extras. Two hours later and I had a run on the squid again, but this time it wasn’t a tench! Ten minutes later and the fish was in the net, a 25lb 3oz catfish (10). So there it was, ten, twenties and thirties from different waters. So all I have to do now is catch a thirty-pound pike again and get some photos this time! Some how I think that’s going to be a lot harder than catching catfish!

Before you go away with the idea that catfishing is incredibly easy, here are some of the waters I’ve blanked on! Rackley Hills, Woburn Sands, Essex Manor Farm, Willow pool, Linch Hill (yes, the one with the big roach in), Club Lake, Orchid Fishery, Burton Mere, Airman Pit, Withy Pool, Parc Farm Two, Bluebell Lakes, Swangey Fen, Marsworth Reservoir, Lakeside, and Homersfield Lake!
Footnote.
Since Tiddenfoot, I spent the 2002 season in Australia, the 2003 season in Iraq and the 2004 season on Marsworth which I can now list on the waters I’ve blanked on (after much study I’m pretty sure that after the big one died there are only 3 cats in there, a twenty, a thirty, and a forty). However, my old catfishing adversary, Keith Lambert has used this period to great advantage and has now had 12 fish of over 20lb from 12 different waters including forty pound plus fish from three venues! A fantastic achievement and the target to beat now there is no official record.