Horseshoe Dreams

Samantha's mirror carp

Samantha Collins-Ratcliffe visits the country's top carp fishery, Horseshoe Lake, but all is not sunshine and delight. The weather has its moods and the rig needs more camouflage.

I started off from sunny Cornwall and the A30 was clear, foot to the floor and as I hit Bristol the heavens opened and down came the rain. As the traffic slowed down to 40 miles an hour there was a slow drive ahead of me going towards the M4. The pace then picked up, I turned off junction 15 edging towards Lansdale and after a while I arrived at the Carp Society’s Horseshoe Lake.

I was greeted by David, one of the Managers at the lake, and we started to chat about what had been coming out that week. He advised me to look at Winter's Bay as some fish were holding up in there.  As I drove slowly around the lake, winter bay was looking the best option for me as there was nobody in there, I finally opted for peg 20, this was a double swim with a fair amount of water to go at.

I began to set up and once again down came the rain, it must have followed me from the M5? Up went the bivvy and out went two kilos of Smokey Fish boilies all over my swim with the throwing sick. Closely followed by two rods loaded up with PVA bags into the edge of the weeds. Within two hours of waiting off went my first rod, a good 10 minute fight and my first Horse Shoe carp on the bank (see top picture).

I'd heard that these carp are one of the best looking strains of fish in the country and I wasn’t disappointed when faced with a lovely scaled mirror on the bank. Later that day I was feeding fish from under my rod tips with crumbed up Smokey fish boilies. These fish weren’t shy, they would have stayed there all afternoon eating all the bait I put in front of them.   

This was good time to test out my new camo rig, as can be seen above it’s camouflaged with a gravel affect but all the straight lines still stand out. As Shaun Harrison once said to me there are no straight lines in nature. So the next stage on my quest for the ultimate camouflaged rig is to disguise the lines even further.  But as far as Horseshoe Lake goes you’re not allowed to use any leaders of any kind, you can only use tubing so this is the best camo I’m probably going to get at the moment.


As the sun went down and the moon came out I sat down and watched the water in the moon light over a glass of red wine. Horseshoe is a very peaceful and tranquil place to fish, next month I plan to return for some more action!