In reply to Post #132
This quartet of anglers really does deserve a special mention for some of their exploits. In particular Gra, Tony, Steve and Nige did very well after they switched to fishmeals working together with Steve W. to put together a very effective bait. (This was well before the Premier boys came down.) While Tat and I were still using Tim Paisley's recipe with the prototype Addits, the Kids went off at a tangent to build on the recipe Steve had been using from Day 1. They had seen how a well-applied food bait could score, especially when it was heavily baited and the four of them quickly reaped the rewards of heavy and consistent baiting. They called their bait The 5-3-1 and even to this day I have no idea what was in it.

As you know if you have read this little tale from the beginning, Steve and Nige were the driving force in developing Treesmill as Roach AC's prime carp venue but they also spread their wings far and wide and caught more or less everywhere they went, jammy buggers. This is Nige with a gorgeous College linear on tigers from the Ponderosa.



And here's Steve with a French lump from the Chateau Lake, taken on one of our infamous Cornios trips.



Graham Orchard was a very successful angler and bailiff. It was Graham who showed us the effectiveness of high attract single hookbaits, in about 1988, when I don't think anyone had mentioned the tactic in print before. I remember turning up in the Beach one day just as Gra was pulling off. He'd had something like 20 fish in his session on single hookbaits at extreme range. He told me what he'd been using and where but I poo-poo'd the tactics, claiming that big beds of bait would be much more successful. I followed him into the Beach and had two on big beds of bait and twelve on single hookbaits! Say no more. He was also a prodigious caster, able to chuck a bait at least thirty yards past any of the rest of us...perhaps this accounted for his successful development of ultra-high attract single hookbaits, now I think of it.

(Graham too passed away some time ago. He was a bailiff on College who stood for no nonsense, was Chairman of Roche AC for several years and did much to develop carp fishing in the local area. He would have found a fond welcome in the Official Longfield Drinking Team, had he ever been invited, as he had hollow legs. Gra was one of those larger-than-life characters, a rough diamond with a heart of gold. I can remember countless acts of truly outstanding generosity on his part. He was a real gent and fantastic company. R.I.P Graham.)

Nige Britton was amazingly successful on College taking the biggest fish in the lake quite a few times at big weights. Sadly Nige never caught a thirty out of College but his run of twenty pound plus carp from College is, I believe, unmatched by anyone who fished the lake. Nige, like myself and most of the other original College anglers have not and will not fish Argal. Nige and Steve Churchill now do their own thing and are consistently successful from Cornwall to Kent and also across the pond.

In reply to Post #133
One of the most successful partnerships to fish the lake was Gary Thomas, Steve Beard and Mark England. These guys bailiffed the lake in the 90s and were heavily involved in trying to save College as a fishery when the threat of closure loomed. They caught a huge number of carp from the lake, and the photo shown here cannot even begin to tell the story of their successes.

Mark England (on the right) and Steve Beard, who with Gary Thomas formed a very successful group of College anglers in the 90s.



This shows Gary on the right on a French trip with his missus Alison on the left. With them is Dutch writer and photographer Cor de Man and his missus.



One time tackle shop (The Bait Bunker) owner Marcus Watts was one of the most successful anglers in the southwest and his catches on College were the stuff of legends. He holds the lake record with a mirror of 34lb and he added a 31lb mirror on the same overnighter, College's first brace of thirties and a record that may even stand to this day (unless someone wants to tell me differently!). Marcus's other claim to fame is The Source, the Dynamite Baits base mix. Marcus developed the recipe specially for the Cornish Reservoirs - originally it was called The Reservoir Special. Marcus worked as product development manager for Dynamite for several years, allowing them to release the recipe as the Source. He now owns Future Baits and his company rolls several tonnes of bait a week from the new factory in Wadebridge...

Other anglers worthy of a mention on College's roll of honour include Martin Cox, Dave Billet, and of course, the amazing Gert Louster. Roy Williams from Portsmouth was a regular visitor and it was Roy who made history at the lake by catching what was at the time the biggest common ever caught in Cornwall, a fish of 29lb + and this capture featured in an advert for Renmill Proteins. Alan White, Terry Smith, Mike Kavanagh, Paul Willis, Vic Cranfield, Nige Cobham and Ian Chilcott visited the lake, as did several of the north Devon Mafia, the Newton Abbot crowd and loads of guys from the Bristol area.

I should also mention the Premier boys, as College was one of the major field testing sites for the fledgling bait firm Premier Baits and all the firm's field testers and directors came down to the lake during the late 1980s. In fact for a long while Prems ruled the roost on the lake, putting every other bait in the shade. Quite a few of the locals switched from what they were using at the time the Prems to ride the coat tails of the success shown by the early visitors from Kent and Essex. If you can recall an article I did for Carpworld back in the late 80s called 'It's a Nightmare' that was all about the first time I came up against the Kent boys and their fishmeals. Prems rule, OK!



For a time it was very hard competing with the overwhelming number of Prems going in and even though I had thought my own bait (the Tim Paisley/Nutrabaits recipe) was going to carry on as before, I was noticing a slow drop off in my catch rate. However, the good old milk HNV still put one or two on the bank, but it has to be said, the visitors from up country really showed us a clean pair of heels. It was time for Nutrabaits to bring out a fishmeal base mix so Bill and Dave Moore put together the mighty Big Fish Mix ands the rest is history! Meanwhile ! Tat and I had to grin and bear it through the frustrating months when Prems were all-conquering, but we still managed to put a few on the bank, even in the face of the onslaught by the Premier boys.

In reply to Post #134
When we started fishing College we were green as grass as far as big waters were concerned, and we didn't really know too much about fishing deep silt either. So every trip we were on quite a steep learning curve. As outlined earlier in this thread, the bait was nothing special at the time – though it improved considerably not long after we started – and the rigs we used were straight forward four inch long nylon bolt rigs with a short hair. We used doctored Drennan Super Specialist hooks, size 4 and the lead was usually a 3-ounce Zipp, which we thought of at the time as the absolute bees knees.

I should perhaps explain the ‘doctored' reference above. In my early years I had been a big fan of Au Lion d'Or spade end hooks. OK they weren't the sharpest hooks in the business, but they worked. These became hard to obtain at one stage so I switched to the eyed versions, which were much thinner in the wire and to be honest not very good! Scratching around for an alternative we stumbled across and article in (I think) the first copy of carp Fisher in which the author was singing the praises of the Drennan Super Specialist hooks. Well, at first we hated them but then Steve came up with the idea of taking a pair of pliers to them. You see, straight out of the packet the SS are straight-shanked straight-point hooks, but we found that they were much more effective if you gave the point a tweak with the pliers so that it was offset; much like the Au Lion d'Ors. Steve also came up with the idea of making the eye down turned, again using pliers to achieve the desired effect. These next two pix show what I mean:





As for reel line, well, we were big Sylcast fans then and used the 11lb b.s. fished straight through to the running lead. We were already experimenting with trying to incite the carp's natural curiosity so the stopper bead we used to protect the knot was 10mm and bright green luminous! This was one of Steve's ideas...he said it worked for flounder in the river so why not for carp? Steve was full of off-the-wall ideas like this and nine times out of ten they actually worked.

The line was fished bar taught in the new adjustable Gardner line clips that were just becoming available. These were whipped to the butt section just above the reel seat and then screwed down tight for maximum bolt effect.



Using these clips you could get the line so tight you could play tunes on it! And I am sure this had something to do with the blistering runs we would get. Of course, this crude state of affairs did not last long and we soon found it necessary to try a bit more subtlety in our approach.

We knew that the lakebed was soft so we assumed it was silt of mud but we had no idea about fishing in silt and the associated problems, nor did we know anything much about plumbing the depth or dragging a lead over the bottom, so it was more a matter of blind faith that saw us chucking those three ounce bullets as far as we could cast them.

In fact the silt in front of the Beach was up to a foot deep but we only found that out a year or so later when I went out for a midnight swim. Putting my feet down to find the bottom I felt my legs sink into the silt. It came up to my knees! This meant that at the time, when we were unaware of the silt, in all probability the lead, and most likely the hooklink, hook and hookbait, were all buried nicely in the soft silt. It didn't seem to matter; we still got blistering takes, even though it was quite probable that the fish were sticking their heads deep into the silt to get at the hookbait!

In reply to Post #135
In later years we experienced some pretty severe drought conditions and the low water exposed several elevated strips of light gravel between the silt beds. Locating these afterwards became a priority as the presentation was that much better on the slightly harder bottom.

Now it would be wrong to call these strips of gravel bars exactly as they came up only a foot at most out of the surrounding silt, but we thought that probably they were formed by underwater currents that washed the silt away from the tops of the strips. Right or wrong, we were convinced that finding these strips of less silty gravel was the answer.

Bars or not, we thought finding them was the key to success. This photo, taken from the SE Point shows the tops of the gravel strips that run across in front of the Beach (on the far left) and the Little Bench swims and they are between thirty and ninety yards out.



You can see from this next photo why was usually made a beeline for the Beach regardless of conditions, as the fish had found the bait to their liking and were visiting the area regularly. As quickly as we put bait in, they came along and mopped it up! We thought it was the bait that was responsible for the fish visiting the area but I guess the lakebed may have had something to do with it too!



Good though the fishing was in the Beach we knew that sooner or later we would have to drag ourselves away from the west bank. Steve had created the new west banks swim, the Ponderosa, and Tat and I had cleared some undergrowth and a few trees to create the Swamp from which we started fishing the back of the islands and to the point of the smaller one. While the fishing in both these newly opened swims was excellent, the fact remained that we needed to expand our knowledge of the rest of the ressie. In the end Steve bit the bullet and started fishing the east bank, starting to explore the area off the SE Point swim. He told us that there was nothing very special about the area in general other than the fact that there were always fish in between the two points at the mouth of the Cut.

Piling the bait in, Steve began to catch off the two points. Then, just before Christmas that year and he too started catching regularly Tat and I fished the SE Point for the first time, while Steve reverted to the Beach again, just in time to record his (at the time) historic catch on Christmas Eve 1983.

Meanwhile Tat and I really took a liking to the swim Steve had developed on the SE Point. Clearly there were more carp in College than we had imagined and they were spread out all around the lake, or so it seemed. Certainly the SE Point was very kind to us. This is one of the rare Italian mirrors that had been stocked into the ressie originally. The fish would become an old friend (Two Scales) and if truth be told she was a bit of a mug. She made many a SW carper a happy chappy as she was a PB for quite a few who fished the ressie until she died following the peanut blitz referred to earlier. As far as I know this was the first capture of the dear old thing in the summer of '84

In reply to Post #136
The week after Tat and I caught a few on the Points we went down for another day trip. There was not another soul on the lake (pretty normal at the time), so having done well on the SE Point we went in there again. Long story short: fishing two rods each we caught 14 carp in seven hours fishing, including a mirror of 29lb 3oz. At the time the fish was a Cornish record, though we didn't shout about it as we were keeping the place well and truly to ourselves. The fish was another of the big Italian mirrors. It was my PB at the time and while it was not particularly pretty but it was significant in that I would catch it again a year or so later when it became my first thirty. Here she is in all her glory'.



At the time night fishing was not allowed and given that we thought we had discovered the El Dorado of carp lakes, we did not wish to risk our tickets by flouting that rule. The venue was far to good to put our fishing at risk simply to fish a night or two. Accordingly every session involved a hundred mile round trip from home to the lake and back, and we would take it in turns driving. I could tell you some tales about Steve's driving but he may be reading this and I don't want to make the guy blush. Suffice it to say, his sense of direction left a lot to be desired! As did the state of his old Ford Cortina; you could see the road going past under your feet through the holes in the floor pan! So given that it was days only – God only knows how many we'd have caught if we had been able to do nights – it came as a very welcome surprise when Stuart Bray gave us, as well and Mick and Bill, permission to night fish. Now we'd see some action!

In reply to Post #136
As I have mentioned previously, I was not as clued up about bait then as I am now and while I had a decent birdfood bait under my belt, thanks to my Ockenham days with Speedy Bill, in truth my knowledge of what constituted a good carp bait was pretty sketchy. When we first started on College was used a simple soya/semolina boilie heavily flavoured and sweetened with Liquid Hermesetas (aspartame). A pretty poor bait nutritionally but it worked like a charm right from the off. With hindsight I now know that our success was more down to the attractors we used (Geoff Kemp and Hutchy flavours) than to the composition of the base mix! This is the 2nd carp I caught from College back in the autumn of 1983 when Tat and I were using the soya/semo/brown sugar recipe.



However, as carp fishing popularity blossomed the bait world was coming of age and Steve in particular began to get caught up in the spider's web woven by the mystique of nutritional recognition, milk proteins, amino acids and other strange potions. Tat and I stuck to the 50/50 mix as it was still catching and we saw no reason to change. Steve meanwhile was following a much more complex path using a milk protein and fishmeals base mix. While he caught one or two we still felt that our pretty basic mix was doing the business.

Steve and I had a few disagreements about the direction he was going with bait so we agreed to go our separate ways on bait - but not on tactics. If one bait started catching more than another we would then all go onto the more successful bait. For a while the more successful bait was the 50/50 mix Tat and I were using, as Steve's largely experimental bait had not performed as expected so we teamed up again, albeit briefly.

The early winter months of 1983/4 were significantly more productive that anything we'd previously experienced as the carp seemed to be queuing up off the Beach and the Little Bench, just waiting for a feed. I've already mentioned Steve's Christmas Eve hit and throughout the winter we experienced some of the best winter fishing we had ever enjoyed. What Steve neglected to tell us was that for his big Christmas Eve hit he had reverted to his milk protein HNV while we plugged away on the 50/50 mix.

Tat and I caught reasonably well in 1984 but it was clear to see that our results on the highly flavoured soya/semo bait was starting to fall off while Steve's results just got better and better. It appeared that our flavour levels were excessive, though we didn't realise this at the time. Consequently we enjoyed brief periods of action followed by a fairly rapid tapering off in our catches. Steve on the other hand, was producing consistent results on his HNV, which was very lightly flavoured. Later I would come to understand more about the use (and abuse) of flavours...I should have listened to Steve!



Though we were fishing as a team, and despite Steve's seemingly better bait and strategy, I was still not at all convinced that Steve's milk protein-based approach was all he cracked it up to be, so I began corresponding with Tim Paisley. At the time Tim was the thinking man's thinking man. What he wrote about bait was ground breaking stuff and his early submissions to the Carp Society's and NASA's early mags were required reading if you wanted to get a better understanding about carp bait. To be honest I didn't know if Tim would reply, as I felt sure my views on bait, as espoused in my first letter to him, would not sit easily with him. However, back came a long letter from Tim explaining his views and giving me a recipe that he had been working on with some of the top carp anglers in the north and in Kent. As far as I know it was the first recipe to use enzymes and other complex chemicals to trigger bait recognition.

In reply to Post #138
By now the word was out about College and we began to see more and more anglers from far and wide visiting the lake and the fishing was definitely getting harder as a result. I hoped that all of Tim's claims for his bait would come true and was not to be disappointed. Tat and I started putting the bait in and after a slow start began to catch fish on it catching the lakes first thirty and countless other fish to boot. By late winter the bait was established and our results had begun to show exactly the pattern Tim had suggested it would, namely that his bait began to out fish every other bait on the lake.



I was very honoured to be chosen by Tim (and as it turned out, by Bill Cottam, who was working with Tim on a product line up for the soon to be born Nutrabaits giant). The bait was an out and out milk HNV (or HERNV – higher nutritional value, as Tim called it) and some of the powders I was given to try were the prototypes of the Addit range. Of course, I didn't know that at the time, all I knew was that if it was good enough for those northern monkeys it was good enough for me.

In fact I almost ruined the bait right from the start by over zealous use of the suggested flavour. Tim had suggested Richworth Blue Cheese at 2ml/lb. I was still stuck on my high attract kick so I ignored this advice and used four times that amount. The bait caught from the off! I wrote to Tim suggesting his level was too low. Back came a furious reply calling me every name under the sun and telling me I was risking ruining his experiments by deviating from the suggested level. Tail between my legs I reverted to the original 2ml and sent a grovelling ‘sorry' letter to Tim!

Tat and I were first anglers in the southwest to try out Tim's HERVN (higher HNV) recipe and I make no bones about the fact that it was entirely down to the bait that we caught so many carp. Truth be told our fishing skills left a lot to be desired but that just shows you the power of a good food bait. Even a couple of relative novices like us can catch...and what gorgeous carp they were too!





The icing on the cake was the capture of the lake's first thirty. I had written to Tim to give a progress report and he wrote back saying that if things continued in the same vein we would sooner rather than later catch the biggest fish in the lake. Was the man psychic?



Tat and I enjoyed amazing success at College and in 1985 alone we caught twenty-four twenties using Tim's HERNV recipe. In fact I got so carried away by College that I fell a victim to the numbers game, skived off, lost my job and generally messed up my life for a while. I was caught on the numbers game roundabout and couldn't get off.

Tim's HERNV with the prototype Addits was a brilliant bait that we used almost unchanged for seven years. In those years Tat and I caught over 1500 fish from College and to be honest I don't think anyone ever came close to that! (unless you know better) and some of our multiple hits were amazing. I can recall several occasions in the early 80s when we had twenty fish in a weekend session.

This is my 1,000th carp from College.



But the bait world was changing and down in darkest Kent a plot was hatching to take over the carp world. Yes, the Prems were about to hit College!

I have mentioned the Premier Baits gang earlier and College had been chosen as one of their testing waters for their revolutionary fishmeal-based bait. Towards the end of the 80s these guys started showing up at College with monotonous regularity. Not only that, they kicked our arses for us with their Peach, Garlic and Nodd Oil fishmeals. The milks that had been so effective previously got shoved aside as the oils slicks grew and the fishmeals piled in. They were just awesome and fished every other bait out of sight.

I continued using Tim's bait and to try to combat the effectiveness of the Prems I even went to extremes going right down in size to 8mm baits. I used the smallest Gardner rolling table and you can imagine how long it took doing a pound of bait and turning it into 1500 or so tiny boilies! Rolling that amount of 8mm boilies was bloody hard work! We used these at Salamander to great effect and for a while they worked well on College, but there was no escaping the fact that the Prems were ruling the roost.

In reply to Post #139
Though the tiny baits did give a brief new lease of life to the milk protein bait, there was no getting away from the fact that fishmeals were the future, and little did I know it at the time but Nutrabaits (my bait sponsor with whom I have had a very happy working relationship since 1985) were about to bring out their own fishmeal base mix. Developed and put together by Dave Moore, the Big Fish Mix took Nutrabaits right back into the game and my results on College and other waters really started to fizz.




By the early 90s College was firmly established as a circuit water. Tat and I had started fishing other SW lakes and had in particular turned our attention to the goings on across the Channel, where Rod was piling ‘em up at Cassien. Steve, Nige and I had already had a few trips across the Pond and to be frank College was loosing its allure.







By 1990 we the place was getting really busy and was not to our taste at all. In fact Tat got so disillusioned with the way College had become a circuit water, and with the carp scene in general that in 1994 she stopped fishing in the UK altogether and she has not fished in this country since. She still fishes abroad when we go on holiday but savage arthritis is catching up and she finds it hard even to hold a rod, let alone land a carp. Mind you when she can overcome the pain she still catches her share, but the glint that used to shine in her eye whenever College was mentioned has faded slowly.

It was sad to fish College on my own after all those years but there was no shifting Tat. However, despite our general disillusionment I always had at least one trip a year there until the fishery closed, just to keep my hand in and teach the new kids on the block a few tricks. Even after the pressure really took hold I was usually able to bag up, thanks to the years I had fished the reservoir. The College carp followed the same patrol routes from day one until the lake closed and you could set your watch by them. There was life in the old dog yet!

In reply to Post #140
In 1985 I began fishing the odd trip at Savay as a guest of my old mate from Ockenham days, Speedy Bill. I was not on the syndicate and held only a season ticket but in those days you needed to put in your ‘apprenticeship' years to allow Pete Broxup to get a look at you and assess whether you would be a good syndicate member - that you didn't upset the applecart by catching too many, in other words! Naturally my trips to College had to be fitted in around the longer journeys but that didn't stop me putting in my fair share of trips to the ressy. However in 1988 I got into the syndicate and spent a lot of my time over the next three years at Savay. It was not easy finding the time or the money to make the 550 mile round trip and still earn a crust, but somehow I managed it!

Fishing Savay meant giving College a lot less attention than had been the case in previous years, but I still kept my ear to the ground and made the odd trip down there in the early 90s.

By now everyone was on fishmeals and the carp in College were beginning to bulk up, as they have done on other lakes ever since the fishmeal revolution started. Naturally the number of 20s grew and so did the number of up-country lads who were returning in ever-greater numbers as the word about College's growing reputation spread.

It was round about now that we began to suspect that we were losing fish. It was nothing you could really put your finger on, but old friends (mug fish if you like) stopped appearing on the bank, and there were little signs that some visitors were up to no good. This fish (see below) was an infrequent but always welcome visitor to the banks. We had caught her on that very first trip down west when she had weighed 11lb. Over the years she gradually put on weight and when she made it past 25lb...well, as I a sure you can imagine, she became a very sought-after prize. Nige caught her at 25lb and ounces and then she vanished! After his capture she was did a disappearing act and given that she was somewhat reclusive we were no unduly concerned. However, the years went by an she remained illusive. When I saw her in one of the weeklies from an up-country lake we understood why! That scale pattern made identification very easy so there was no mistaking it was the same fish.!

In reply to Post #141
I well recall one early summer's morning when I had to leave early to get back home for work. As I walked down the dry footpath leading down to the car park by the dam, I noticed a trail of water leading across the boards and along the path. This gradually petered out beside one of the swims in the Cut. I was beginning to have my suspicions, so I stopped, put my gear down and had a good look around. At the water's edge in the swim where the trail had started to falter, a big damp area soaked the grass and the path, and then once again the trail of water lead off again towards the dam wall.

This was worrying! Sure enough, as the trail dried out again, also alongside a swim, yet another big patch of water soaked the ground and the path and another trail of water lead across the dam and into the car park. There it stopped abruptly. It was clear that someone had been walking a sacked fish or two from his swim in the North Bay, back to the car park, stopping every now and then to get his breath back and to allow the fish a brief rest in the water, hence the large damp patches where the sack or sacks had been lifted out again.

I knew whose car had been parked there and it was gone, and so too I reckoned were the fish. I went back to the swim where matey had been fishing and noticed those familiar damp areas on the bankside again. I asked his mate who was fishing next to him in the same swim where the guy had gone. “Oh, he's just popped down to the caff for some breakfast and to buy some fags,” he said. “That's funny,” I said, “the caff isn't open for another hour yet”. He flustered and stammered his way through one excuse or another so I said that I would wait with him until his mate got back.

Then I heard a guy walking up the path from the opposite direction. It was big Graham Orchard, season ticket holder and honorary bailiff. He had been walking around before starting fishing and as he came into the swim he saw I was not happy. I told him what I thought had happened, and Gra fronted up the guy about nicking fish. As he protested his innocence his mate returned and he was carrying two well wrung out carp sacks. Caught bang to rights. Graham took their tickets off them and tore them up, then kicked their rods up in the air and their banksticks out of the ground and told them to **** off and to tell all their mates from their home town that they were no longer welcome either.

So while that closed one loophole there was no doubt that other groups were still trying to nick fish. This lead a group of us to ask for a meeting with SWW with a view to about forming a syndicate on College. I think at the time we offered about £10,000 a year, which I am sure was more than they were getting in ticket money, but they refused. We then put a proposal to SWW that a RAC be allowed to put the ressy on their books and thereby increase visitor numbers and at the same time better police the water. This too was turned down. It was hugely frustrating, made even more so by the fact that a few weeks later Gra was admonished for his “heavy handed” approach! Can you believe it? We both resigned on the spot. The whole thing left a nasty taste in my mouth and this was not helped when I received a letter from Del Mills, the fishery manager at the time, telling me that I was banned from the water for 12 months for over-aggressive bailiffing! WTF?!

Well, as I said previously, I was falling out of love with College anyway and this just gave me the extra boost I needed to go travelling, both up-country, mainly to Savs, and across the pond, where there was plenty of virgin water to play with. The Chateau Lake was about to appear on my radar and a whole new set of adventures lay ahead.

In reply to Post #142
College was always a weedy water at the best of times but some years it was really bad. On the other hand some years the weed died a bit and though it was still challenging to fish, the weed was then comparatively easy to deal with. The problem weed was of course Canadian Pondweed and while this provided plenty of shelter, it wasn't particularly rich and it seemed to choke off the much more productive water milfoil. However, the milfoil always made a speedy recovery when the Canadian was not so bad and then it provided ample food and shelter for the carp.

College has a pH of around 7.5 – 7.8, quite a high reading that accounts for its richness in natural food. The fish could get a feed more or less anywhere they chose just by sticking their heads down into the silt or by grazing in among the weeds. Obviously the weed was one of the keys to finding the fish but again they were very fussy about where and in which type of weed they would feed. Find milfoil on a hard bottom and you had a chance. The pondweed never produced much, even though the fish went in to seek shelter, and the marginal mares tails were not as productive as you might think.

All in all, the key to success was finding the hard patches in amongst the weed stems As if this wasn't enough of a challenge, the fish definitely had favourite feeding areas, so not only did you need to find the general area they favoured but also the spot within a spot where they fed more confidently. Once such area was off the point of the smaller island that could be fished from the Swamp. For obvious reasons this was one of the most popular swims on the lake, thanks in no small part to the thick weedbeds behind the island.

Though the weed was not what anyone could call a problem, there were some swims that were weedier than others...this was good for me! You see, very few of the new gang of anglers who had now started fishing College (this is the mid 90s now) seemed able to deal with weed so they tended to fish the less chocked swims in the deeper areas of the lake. Me! Well I just made a beeline for the swims with the thickest weed in front of them!

The North Bay was a particularly bad area (or good area depending on your point of view!) and fishing in either Mick's Swim or on the North East Point swim at the mouth of the Cut put you right on top of the weedbeds, and therefore right on top of the carp!

In reply to Post #143
Here is a photo of the weed that lay directly in front of the NE Point.



And this shot looks into the North Bay.



As you can see the main body of weed starts about 70m away and then grows quite strongly almost to the other side. I always liked to fish up to the weed, as opposed to in it, across it or over it, as I reckoned this gave me a better chance of a) stopping them from getting into the weed in the first place, and b) getting them out of the weed if they did manage to get in there. The weed was extensive during the summer months but it's whereabouts told you a lot about the water. You see this weed would only grow in about five feet of water. Any deeper and for some reason it failed to grow properly. It also seemed to favour the more silty areas of the lakebed so if you took the weed as your starting point it was quite easy to find deeper, more gravely areas by fishing to the holes in the weed.

The weed showed me the most likely acres to fish and I welcomed it with open arms. Sadly there was a vociferous group of season ticket holders who felt quite the opposite, and they had the ear of new fishery manager, Reg England of Peninsula Coarse Fisheries. Reg found himself getting increasingly snowed under with complaints, mainly about the thickness of the weed, from a small group of sad losers who, instead of accepting College for the challenges it posed, accepting that the weed was not going to go away and coming to terms with it, niggled away with silly little irrelevant moans. They not only complained about the weed but also about access and the small head of fish! Small head of fish...What's that all about? The lake contained at least 200 good sized carp in only 40 acres of water and many of them were now pushing thirty pounds with a few others now well into the thirties.

Then they complained about the boards, which it is true had fallen into disrepair in places. Hey guys! You should have seen it before the wooden walkways were built. It was like an assault course just getting to your swim! So now the boards were collapsed in a few places. So what? Get over it! Yes, the boards did for a time make walking around the ressy with a load on your back a lot easier, but hey, things that are worth working for are not necessarily going to be easy! These are the boards in question, photographed when we first started fishing College in the spring of 1984 when bluebells bordered the wooden walkways that for a time made access considerably easier. When a few lengths of these walkways fell into disrepair the moaners got their pens out again.

In reply to Post #144
So what with one thing and another Reg had College up to here and when the Cornwall Wildlife Trust expressed an interest in taking College off Peninsula's hands, Reg jumped at the chance to get these moaning idiots off his back. Revenue was falling and belt tightening meant there was not enough money in the kitty to effect repairs, so the CWT was manna from heaven.

Mark, Steve and Gary and to a lesser extent Steve C, Nige and myself, mounted a fierce rearguard action to try to save the lake, but the damage was done and the lake was closed. In the winter of 1998/9 the lake was netted and the carp were transferred to Argal. In the passing years the great reservoir reverted to the overgrown jungle it was when, in 1982 Tat and I first set foot on its banks at the start of a carping journey that still winds on and on! In just 16 short years College had risen to become one of the top day ticket waters in the UK before falling into disrepair and neglect.

There are still some carp left in College. I know this because I heard from a little birdie or two that during the netting quite a few carp were “encouraged” to find their way under the foot rope and back into the lake. Whether they are still there today is debatable. The otter menace that has affected Cornwall like a plague since the early 90s probably has lead to many of those magnificent beasts being killed. I know that otters are attacking the old College fish up in Argal so perhaps it is no use crying over spilt milk. Here are the three last fish that I caught from College (NE Point swim in about 1994 or '5, a fitting way to end this, don't you think)?





Just writing this has been hard for me. I miss College more than words can say. In 1998 College closed its doors to angling. Au Revoir College. It was the greatest fun while it lasted. This is one of my favourite views of the lake, taken from the top of the field behind the NE Point



That completes the story of our love affair with College. I will return to the lake from time to time as I recall further South West Memories, but for the moment though, I will move on.

In reply to Post #145
I would love to read your further ramblings Ken. A great read so far and takes me back to the good old pioneering days of carp fishing.

In reply to Post #145
Ken - I'm definitely up for some more articles!