Warwickshire Avon Carp....job done.

I've just come back off holiday with the family in Brecon but last Friday morning managed to catch an elusive river carp after a few times trying. Not quite a double, just 9lb 15oz but as it's my first river carp it's a PB.

The venue is slow, deep, full of lilies and is home to decent size carp.

Locating them is the key and after catapulting a few dog biscuits in various likely places I waited and watched. Didn't take long either as they were showing on the surface after an hour or so. You honestly wouldn't know fish that big would be in the area unless you knew. I bought two rods, one a float set-up to fish some bread on the bottom and also a rod with a fox bubble float to fish some crust on the surface.

I wanted to keep the float static, I remembered watching one of John Wilsons programs where he rested a bit of peakcock quill on a lily pad. I did exactly that, a tad crude but a good way of resisting the flow and there would be no doubt when you had a bite. A few carp were grubbing about in the margins so an ideal method. The water was gin clear and there were two ghost carp that stood out like beacons, and one of the carp looked a foot thick, it was massive.

It's a 3ssg float and all the shot was a couple of inches from the hook with a bit of crust on a big hook, what carp could resist.

For half and hour or so not much happened but then you know what it's like, sods law sometimes comes in to play. The Wife rang me up and literally as I answered the float shot under, the centrepins ratchet was singing and a mini tsunami appeared around the now invisible float. The Wife could wait so in the panic the bait bag was kicked over, the phone was thrown on the ground and I was playing a decent carp.

The problem was it managed to take far more line than I liked and it got amongst some thick roots. It wasn't budging. I let the fish settle for a few minutes and eventually it was pulling on the end of the rod tip, it still wasn't budging though and eventually it made the most of it's haven and it broke me off.

I thought that would be the only chance I'd get but with swim disturbed I moved 100ft downstream where I spotted a quite a few sunning themselves. I threw some dog biscuits upstream and they were soon up in the water feeding off them. I gave it a good half hour before lowering in a bait and this time the bread was to be fished on the surface.

I love surface fishing and I've lost count the amount of times I've fluffed strikes. These days I like to use a water filled bubble float and allow the weight of the float to hook the fish, no striking and it's a method that seems to work really well.

I cast the float upstream and it slowly meandered down the river and I teased the line so the float stopped on a lily pad with the crust a metre away from the float. The smallest fish in the swim was more active than the rest and within only about 2 minutes the bread was engulfed and the fish was on.

I had to bully the fish really the swim didn't allow me to play it, so it was on the bank pretty quickly. A decent fight though and a stunning coloured common.

With the weather looking like it's going to be nice for another week at least, I'm planning to go back and try for a bigger one. No better time at the minute and might as well make hay and all that.