A smashing ton at Viaduct Fisheries?

WHEN ice becomes a factor in targeting lakes for a bite or two, my inclination is to head for the river. The chances of finding moving water frozen over are substantially less than that of still waters and to be honest, I'd almost certainly be at the river at this point in the season anyway.

But not every river holds a head of carp, whereas it seems that nearly every lake does, be it commercial fishery or club water. It also seems that this is the species for which the masses want to fish. Now, this is no revelation and it's been the case for what seems like forever, or at least since I became aware of trends within the sport.

I believe that it's this voracious appetite that anglers have for hauling carp which has fuelled the recent debate over whether ice should be smashed when fisheries become frozen, and indeed, has been the deciding factor when people have chosen to do so.

As a passionate angler, I want to wet a line as much as the next person, but when confronted by a frozen lake I just wouldn't bother to get my kit out of the car. If I wanted to go ice fishing, I'd go to Alaska and do it properly. Chances are, the fish aren't going to feed anyway, and call me naïve, but surely carp wouldn't be the obvious target species in freezing temperatures... would they?

Well apparently they would. News that bosses at Viaduct Fisheries in Somerset, spent two days smashing ice so that a match could go ahead came as a bit of a surprise to me. But it was a 100-peg event so I can understand that they didn't want to lose out on the revenue that it would generate.

But what was a real shock to me were the winning weights. A few pounds of roach right? Wrong. The top three anglers all breached the “magical ton barrier” with the winner putting together a 144lb bag. The story doesn't specify what species the fish were but my money is on that well documented winter feeder, the carp.

To me this is unnatural. How was it possible to catch so many carp so synonymous with lazy summer evenings and floating baits, from a lake where it took the preceding two days to smash the covering layer of ice?

This says two things to me. Firstly, the viewpoint that smashing ice is detrimental to fish stocks is blown clean out of the water. Clearly, it isn't.

Secondly, it speaks volumes about the fish in commercial fisheries. These carp must have become so conditioned to a regular feed-up of angler's baits that two days under ice must have been the equivalent of a heroin addict going cold turkey for them. When the bait started going in again they must have been only too relieved to get their hit as the dinner bell was sounded.

More worryingly, such a high stocking density means that the fish begin to get seriously hungry after two days under ice, as competition for what natural food exists is fierce, and they haven't had the slightest sniff of a pellet upon which they usually rely. So these fish need that bait and were queueing up to be hooked.

And that's really my beef with commercial fisheries. I'm not a biologist but if these were wild fish, surely they'd be lying up and conserving energy, avoiding predators and perhaps feeding sporadically, not consistently over five hours. When I go fishing, I want it to be an experience where I try to outwit a wily creature in it's natural habitat that is behaving in a way that has taken thousands of years of evolution to perfect, and yes, I often fail but that's all part of the game. What happened at Viaduct Fisheries is akin to feeding time at the zoo and I still can't quite get my head around it and the type of angling experience it represents.