Trevor Patterson talks about his capture of Clover from the Road Lake

 

The road lake has a max stay rule of 48hrs.It was 2 days after I had caught 3 scales and I was allowed back to the lake. I headed back down to the grassy knowle end to see if the carp were still down that end of the lake and they were. That’ll do me I thought and continued to set up. 
I looked at the spot that I had caught 3 scales from and it didn’t look clean or that it had been eaten on since I left. So I dropped a bait on it. There was a tree-lined margin to my right, which has some nice gravel running along it so I opted to put my right hand rod under an over hanging tree. I had fished this spot a few times last season but had had no success. If you don’t know the road lake it is a very weedy and silty water so if you can find a hard spot fish to it, because there aren’t many that’s why I was happy to fish under that tree. After the first 24hrs nothing had happened and my confidence was starting to dwindle,” had they moved down the other end of the lake”?

I decided to reel in and climb a tree over one of my spots to have a look to see if any carp were about and to see if they had eaten any of my bait. My bait was still there, but so were the carp so I was happy they were still in the area, when all of a sudden a big “CRACCCCK” the branch broke and I fell head first into the lake!

 I managed to drag myself up the bank at the same time a good friend of mine Tony ”the nose” came round the corner looked at me and said “ I thought I heard a carp crash out but it was you!” Being such a good friend he never took the micky out of me, which most people would, me included. He just looked at me and said “ you’ve got a bit of weed on your head!” Then we both burst out laughing. In hindsight I was lucky, things could have been far worse. I got changed into some dry clothes and proceeded to put the rods back on to the same spots, I was sure I had spooked the carp with my high diving antics, but didn’t want to climb another tree to see if they had gone. An hour later a carp crashed over my right hand rod, my confidence was back.

At 6.30pm my right hand rod wiped round and the buzzer let out a scream, I was in!

After giving a good account for itself I netted it. I looked down in the net and couldn’t recognize the fish, Tony came round and held the net whilst I sorted out scales etc my amazement Tony said to me” it’s clover!” I replied “come on tone I’ve had enough wind ups this week, with the foam and falling out of the tree”. He said “I’m not winding you up its clover!” I looked down in the net the fish had rolled over and now you could see those distinctive clover shaped scales. That’s another p.b I thought.

.We put it on the scales to see them tip round to 36.04oz, I had broken my p.b twice in a week I was so happy as you can imagine as the two fish were top of my list and I had broken my p.b twice in a week. That’s what dreams are made of, although I'd had a bit of a nightmare

 

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