The Stuff Of Childhood Dreams!

Pole Fishing set £70,000 Maver Match This winner Rob Wootton a challenge: to catch his fi rst-ever canal carp on the good old ‘jam roll’.

I just love my canal fishing! This stems from a childhood in the early 1990s of being abandoned during the summer holidays on the banks of the local canal armed with just my fishing kit, while my parents went to work.

There would usually be at least couple of us and often we would see huge shapes basking just below the surface – these carp to us looked enormous, occasionally we would hook one but only for the briefest of battles to end with our Zim No8 elastic or 3lb Maxima giving up. This was our riot gear at the time, which meant that these fish, to us kids at least, became totally unobtainable. The stuff of childhood dreams.

It was a summer evening on the bank with my dad that changed things. He’d spotted a couple of fish cruising, so armed with just 11 metres of pole and a home-made dibber rig he went for a bit of a nomadic ‘dobbing’ session. Standing up and dangling a worm in front of the cruisers he was soon shouting for the landing net, and not long afterwards a carp of around 5lb was on the bank. To me this fish looked massive – commercials weren’t around at this time – so this was the first carp I’d seen in the flesh and it just made me want to catch one myself.

Several years passed and despite trying many times I still hadn’t broken my canal carp duck, and it was only quite recently after resorting to a lump of floating bread on a red-hot summer’s day that I managed to lure one to the bank. Carp in my local canal are pretty few and far between and it’s rare that I get the chance now to visit a stretch that holds good numbers of the species. So when editor Alex Bones phoned me asking for a canal carp feature I was initially a bit stumped!