Against all recommendations

Going against all recommendations
and breaking my personal record

My first carp session of 2012 - by Pali

Finally I was able to get out there for a full weekend Carp session; this was my first overnight fishing trip of 2012. I have had plans to go out for so long, but then the water froze solid, my daughter got sick and so on. The following weekend I had everything packed from the weekend before, had charged up my camera and nothing could stop me. At least that’s what I thought - Thursday morning I cracked a tooth and had to get it pulled Friday morning, so with that start on my weekend I didn’t feel like going anywhere. Tho half my face was still numb you just know, that’s only going to last till the anesthetic wears off and then pain will follow. Not really the best combination for a fishing trip and sleeping outdoors in match, with a bleeding bone deep crater in the jaw. We still have cold nights, some below freezing. Normally that’s not something that would bother me, but let’s face it I’m not Bear Grylls.

My daughter canceled the following weekend, as she had some school things she needed to take care of. So now I was determined to get out there, but where to go? Last year I have been fishing all the local ponds on the island I live on, also visiting a few not so local ponds and lakes. I wanted this to be a great start of 2012, now that I had so much trouble getting started.

A few years ago I moved from the mainland to the Island Fyn, moving in with my wonderful girlfriend. I used to live in a small town called Haderslev, where there are some wonderful areas with great nature. A wonderful forest, a few good size ponds. One near an old water mill, a place I have spent many summer nights, mainly drinking a few around a campfire with good friends. But I have often seen carp fishers around the lake, also I found some information that the carps in the lake where old. (15-20 years or more)
I figured that there would be a fair chance they had grown huge, if not savages with bbq’s have eaten them all or thieving basterds have moved them all to ‘private’ ponds. Why I’m not very specific with lake names and locations, but again if your local or have a bit of insight as an Danish carp angler you will know what lake I’m talking about. (If your a catch and release angler, you can always write me for locations) 

The Carp Addiction

Try it once and Carping can get you hooked for life!– by Pali

As mentioned in my first blog post, I’m an addict angler and one of my poisons is Carp fishing.
First time I heard about carp fishing was from a mate I knew thru a friend’s Chat room, he was always on about all these huge carps he was landing. And yeah yeah it’s all great, everyone know how fishermen like to tell tales and on their way home the fish grow an extra foot and gain a few pounds. I really didn’t know anything about carp fishing, and did not pay much attention to his ½drunk fisherman tales to begin with.

Then one day I’m out fishing for bait in a pond I at the time just recently heard about, I see these 3 guys with a lot of fancy equipment. At least it looked very fancy to me as a regular Joe, who might been fishing for many years but mainly for trout and pike. They are there with some odd tents (bivys) and electronic bait alarms and what not; I’m standing at fair distance fishing for my common roaches that I’m going to use for bait in the following weekend for Pike fishing. I don’t know what to think, besides “isn’t that a bit too much equipment and taking all the fun out of fishing with electronic bait alarms?”

Short after one of their alarms go off and this funny looking little fella come running out of his tent, like a Jack-in-the-box he’s running to his rod. In a speed that’s normally only seen if someone just knocked over a Harley Davidson outside a Biker bar, he reaches his rod and picks it up and set’s the hook. Now it got interesting, it was clearly not a small fish he just hooked.
By the bend on his rod and the scream from his reel, that was not a bad size fish at all. I took a sip of my beer and continued to fish for my puny little roaches, thinking “Ahh they are pike fishing and he had hooked a large Pike, good for them”.
But after good fight he landed something I had to go investigate, I was standing too far away to see what he just caught. But not that far away, that it wasn’t clear to me that, it was defiantly not a pike!

A Passion for Fishing

An introduction of an angling addict, powered by passion! - by Pali

This is my first blog entry here; in fact it’s my first blog entry ever. I used to have an online diary on a gardening site, where I would do daily or weekly updates on my passion for indoor and greenhouse gardening. Share pictures and helpful step-by-step information, DIY tutorials on hydroponic grow systems and True Aeroponics. That later led me to write product reviews for an European gardening magazine published in 5 languages, I have traveled as far as to Australia to optimize greenhouses for flower production. But enough about all that, this is a blog about my passion for fishing.

It all started with my granddad taking me fishing a summer when I was a small kid, no more than 6 years old. Fishing in the stream running not far from their house, he showed me how to tie my first knots and how far from the cork we should place the hook n worm. We would sit for many hours that summer fishing, just talking and looking for that cork float to go under. We would eat the lunch my grandmother had prepared us, he would drink a cold beer and I would drink my grandmother’s homemade fruit cordial, and if I was really lucky I would maybe get a soda pop.

I have always loved the outdoors, as a kid I grew up on a small farm where we grew all our veggies, milked our cow and slaughtered our own animals for meat. I didn’t have a lot of fancy toys, no PlayStations and Xbox’s around back then (later I would get a Comodore64). My best friend was my ET bike (BMX bike) and my fishing rod, after watching Steven Spielberg’s Movie ET in the 80’s every real boy wanted a BMX bike. They were common known here as the ET bike. I would ride that for several miles on dirt roads, with a backpack on my back. Packed with my small telescopic rod, a small tackle box, my lunchbox with a few sammies and something to drink. Riding to the nearest trout lake, there I would hide my bike in the forest scrubs and sneak into the pay lake area. Crossing a stream by a knocked over tree, as I didn’t have money to pay for the fishing. Being around 7-8 years old, no one really paid any attention to me anyway. Everyone would think I was with my parents there, but the fact being I can’t really recall my dad ever taking me fishing just him and me. After some time the owner started to notice I was there a lot, but never gave me any trouble about it. Told me to pay when I could and when I could not it was okay too, but it would be better if I parked my bike in the parking area and walked on the trails to the pond, instead of hiding in the bushes and risking falling in the cold stream, crossing it all by myself in the forest with no one to help me if I had fallen in.