Thursday 03/04/2008 Shangri-La

John Bennett invited me to help one of the Carps AC new juniors at Shangri-La, which I agreed to do. For those that have not fished this nine peg pool I have attached a photograph (right). The house and pool is owned by John's son Martin. I can remember Martin fishing for the Flowerpot back in the "real" winter league days. The pool is stuffed with Carp varying from 2oz to 20 lbs. There are also Tench and Chinese Koi. Shangri-La is the venue for the Carps AC Thursday evening league.

The junior was fourteen year old Ryan Houghton who had not caught a fish before. Colin Golding kindly gave Ryan an old Trabucco 13 metre pole. I set him up with a 4x14 Carp float he had in his box to 0.22 G-Line straight through to a 16 Colmic Nuclear hook. The swim was five foot deep (twice that of Bullocks Farm!). Decided that it would be best to fish corn at dead depth at 7 metre (there is a 10 metre maximum rule). Cupped in twelve corn kernels. Ryan's first put-in resulted in a three pound Mirror Carp and Ryan's first fish in the net! As the picture (bottom left) shows Ryan was really pleased - what a smile - makes it all worth while. Ryan and I decided that the best feeding pattern was three fish for every twelve kernels of corn. I must say I was impressed how quickly Ryan adapted to pole fishing (one to watch for in the not too distant future). Ryan fished for five hours and weighed in 43lb 12oz. The photograph (bottom right) shows part of Ryan's first Carp bag.



Note: Juniors fish for free with Carps AC and get one to one tuition! For more information go to http://www.carpsac.co.uk