Christmas Blog - 'Virgin' lakes

December 19, 2024

You’d be surprised at just how many virgin waters are out there and these represent the ultimate challenge. But hang on a minute: surely if the carp have not been fished for they'll be easy-peasy? Not necessarily! I know of a couple of lakes down my way where the carp are un-pressured but they are far from easy. The one in the photo is just such a lake.

I think the modern approach of using HNV boilies can have its drawback, namely the fact that the carp have not yet come to think of them as 'Food'. (The subject of 'food baits' is one I have written about before, so have a search.) Some would say that carp need to be weaned onto your bait. I disagree; if it is sending out the right messages they will react to it. However, I now believe the carp can become confused by too many food messages coming at them all at once.

So, how many is too many? Here are some of my favourite attractors; I use them +frequently. A combination of two or three of these can be highly effective in a bait; however, using all of them is overkill! Now I will freely admit that there was a time when I didn't believe you could have too many 'come hither' food signals; now I think that such an approach is flawed. I reached this conclusion when watching a shoal of river carp I had found on a small river in France. I had put together what was, I believed, an irresistible bait just oozing with positive vibes. To my astonishment they totally ignored the freebies and flatly refused to feed. But these were virgin carp that should have responded very positively, assuming I had got the bait right? (Clearly I hadn't!.)

Why, was this happening I wondered? Were their ol' factory senses overwhelmed, the 'eat me' signals completely wiped out? Reluctantly I had to accept the fact that no matter how attractive the bait may appear to be to us, to a carp it could be the complete opposite.

Ken with a fishing rod, in front of a sunset.

I love fishing new lakes and rivers. I love them for their unpredictable nature; you never know what is going to come along next. I love them for the relative naivety of the carp and the unpressured surroundings and atmosphere. I adore out-of-the-way lakes and rivers and relish the prospect of venturing into pastures new. Sadly reality rears its ugly head more often these days, as due to the slow but steady advance of Old Father Time I simply cannot muster the effort and sheer hard work involved to look for and then fish virgin lakes.

However, I can offer no more exciting a challenge to aspiring young carpers than fishing a new virgin water. This was the case when I started fishing the Chateau Lake (Etang de la Poiteviniere 44). When I first fished there I thought I had discovered died and gone to heaven as there were thirties galore in there, and quite a few forties to boot!

Of course, every now-famous venue water starts out as virgin. Somebody's got to be first! All the UK's high profile pits and reservoirs were unknown once upon a time and it took the adventurous pioneering spirit of our top anglers to uncover their secrets. On the continent St Cassien, Orient, Der, Raduta and many others were all virgin before some free spirit discovered their potential. The now world-famous Rainbow Lake was unfished when Bill and I visited it in 1994 to make the first ever video about the now-famous lake (see photo). Now look at it!

Black and white image of Ken Townley holding a fish.

My history is littered with examples of waters I visited when they were entirely or relatively unknown and in some cases I opened them up to a wider audience. College Reservoir in the county of Cornwall was totally unfished when Carole and I first went there in 1982 but in three short years it went from unknown to famous and it was impossible to get a swim at the busy times.

The same applies to France. In 1989 my mate and I did a real Tour de France, looking for the unknown, and not knowing if we’d found it! Well to cut a long story short, we had! (Found it!) We didn’t do too well on that visit, but we caught enough to encourage a return and when we went back the following year we caught more and bigger fish. In fact, I was lucky enough to catch my first ‘forty’.

In 1988, when I first visited France we fished a lake that nowadays is one of the best-known lakes in the country. Myself and a couple of my mates were the only anglers on the whole 200 acre lake and at the time we thought we were fishing for a lot of doubles with perhaps the odd twenty thrown in. This turned out to be the case but since then I have watched those carp grow from low twenties to over sixty pounds. Sadly this once pristine lake has been ruined by angler pressure to the extent that night fishing is now banned and only a limited number of permits are issued each year.

I’d love to find another Lac de la Poiteviniere! I remember how hard I tried to get onto that lake…For three years running I kept hustling away at the owners to open what was at the time a very private lake, one that was full of carp! It was so frustrating standing on the road at the gate to the estate, watching carp crash out with gay abandon, knowing that here was a dream lake that was unfished, totally virgin, yet absolutely and 100% private and likely to remain so.

However, in 1994, the owners saw the sense in letting anglers onto the lake and at last I was allowed to step onto that hallowed ground. Now, some thirty years later the lake is well-known and is certainly no virgin, but way back then I felt like I had been given the key to heaven’s door! I truly have lost count of the number of big carp that I have landed from The Chat, certainly hundreds!

Mind you, it has to be said that I have fished some right turkeys in my time, but if you don’t try them you might miss out. I can remember fishing a lake that was reputed to hold fish to 25kg…I wish! If indeed it did hold them, we never saw them! We fished it hard for two nights and three days before pulling off, exhausted, after catching about a million carp, only one of which went over 5kg!

So lets say you have found that rare jewel, a carp lake that has never been fished before. So how do you go about fishing this paradise? Well, you could just go in with boiled baits, I suppose, but in my book that can be a bit of a hit and miss approach. It is likely that the carp will not have seen a boiled bait before. Even though the bait firms go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that they use the best feeding triggers and attractors there will always be venues where boiled baits are not an immediate success.

I believe that in order to create feeding activity I need to attract as many fish as possible into my swim. By this I mean all coarse fish, not simply carp. I want to attract anything that swims to the bait carpet in the hope that their frantic feeding activity will in turn draw carp to the bait to investigate. Carp are inquisitive and greedy creatures and you can use this to your advantage by triggering their curiosity via the feeding frenzy caused by the smaller fish. OK, these fish are in a feeding frenzy on surface baits, but imagine creating a similar aggressive/competitive feeding spree on the lakebed.

The best way to attract smaller fish is to offer them a carpet of soft, well-flavoured bait, and a lot of it! Groundbait, pellets, seeds and smaller particles all play their part in forming an attractive bait carpet but you can also add boilie crumb and a few chopped baits as well for when the carp eventually arrive. Groats and pellets are probably the most convenient baits under these circumstances but don't ignore the commercial groundbaits where all the hard work has been done for you. Take our own SuperRed (see photo) for instance, based on our formidable additive Robin Red. All you could ever wish for in a pre-mixed groundbait.

Mix SuperRed with a blend of liquid attractors diluted in water to create a stiff paste and you are ready to rock and roll.

You will find that the natural binders in SuperRed will help you to form groundbait balls, as shown here. A catapult, or a groundbait sling can fire these out and they add pulling power to the bait carpet, which encourages even the most cautious carp to creep in to investigate the source of this strange smelling grub.

This stunning cocktail of attraction is the perfect trio of liquid attractors. Add it to water then apply it to SuperRed. Finally blend in with a fork or similar. The liquids compliment the natural attraction of SuperRed and back up the pulling power of the groundbait.

If I am going to be away from home for a few days, say on a weekend session, then I like to pre-mix my liquid attraction at home, storing it in a drinks bottle. This makes creating fresh groundbait at the waterside easy.

finished carp bait in scoop being poured into black bucket

As a starting point I introduce 5kg of the prepared soft groundbait mix over quite a wide area around my chosen spot. It might be that the carp don’t arrive straight away but if you have seen fish showing in the area and have isolated a significant underwater feature, it is a good bet that they will arrive sooner or later. Once they do so you need to be ready to top up the bait carpet with more groundbait, this time adding some harder carp-specific free offerings to the mix: for instance, I like to add a few tiger nuts to the groundbait.

Eventually you should aim to stop putting in soft baits altogether. By now the small fry will have done their job so you want them to leave the bait to the carp. The more fry-resistant hard baits in the swim, the more confidant the carp will become. These hard boiled Robin Red 'chops' are perfect. I outline how to create 'chops' elsewhere in my blogs, but briefly it involves rolling the ball of paste into pan-sized sausages, then boiling the sausages and when they have cooled cutting them into 'chops'.

This photo is of 25kg of home-tied PVA-meshed 'bits'. Is it enough? Depends on how many carp you are fishing for…

…Which will differ from lake to lake. You should soon find out just how much bait you should be introducing each day. Hectic action followed by long blank spells means that the fish are probably moving out of the swim because there’s no more bait left. Steady feeding, when no one time of the day seems any better or worse than another, probably indicates that you’ve got the baiting just about right. As a general rule of thumb, for a week-long session I take the following:

· 50kg Mixed seeds and small particles such as hempseed, groats, etc

· 25kg groundbait such as SuperRed.

· 10kg of ready-made boilies

· 10kg of 'fresh' boilies

· 2 litres of blended liquid attractors

· 20kg Pellets

I can hear your gasps now and, yes, it sounds like a lot, but why skimp on the bait when this might be your only chance to hit the big time before the world and his wife find the lake? This big mirror came on a huge carpet of bait. I'd far rather take too much bait than not enough!

finished carp bait in a scoop on the lakeside

On the other hand, on small intimate lakes I usually fish for one take at a time. This involves using only enough bait to encourage a pick up, without piling in the bait to an excessive level. What's enough? That's the million-dollar question! The angler will have to decide himself how much bait to introduce to tempt a carp into picking up the hookbait. It may be a little as the hookbait and a three-bait stringer. Or maybe the hookbait, a stringer, a handful of crumb and a dozen freebies. You'll have to decide for yourself. I regard this amount of Robin Red & Hempseed per rod as 'enough' on most small waters.

Things move fast in the carp world these days so strike while the iron is hot. Get out there and be a pioneer! It’s so much more satisfying that following the crowd! Back in the day when I first started carping in Cornwall I though there were only one or two carp waters in the county. Then I started exploring and discovered many more! Catching them was a doddle!