unhookable runs

hi guys im new to the forum but not to fishing, i have been fishing for over 30 years now and have tried my hand at pretty much every style and type of fishing going though my main love is pike and cat fishing.
this season i rejoined a local lake that holds carp and cats to over 40lbs, i last fished this water 20 years ago and i have been having some hastle as the lake has changed dramaticaly since i last fished.
the main problem i have had is the amount of silt in the lake (6-18" at least). to over come the silt problem my friend has been using the chod rig and i have been using a pateronster rig with the hook inline and the lead on a small light line leader with silicon tubing to overcome the problems with tangles in the silt. both of these rigs seem to be working well, or should i say both of these rigs come back in tangle free.
yesterday we arrived at the lake at 5am and fished over a large bed of pellets that we had put out the night before. within minutes i had my first run a single toner with liver on the hook, a couple of mins later i had a nice jack pike in the net. recast and 5 mins later another single toner i struck and didnt even feel the fish, this set the tone for the rest of the day, we both had countless bites and screaming runs yet never managed to connect with a single fish.
on 1 rod i had a snowman rig with 18mm boilies and about 1/2" gap between the hook and bait. i know my hook links work well as i connect with over 90% of runs on linear with identical hook links, yet i never conected with a single run. the same again with the 2 rods that had liver, i had hooked the liver and threaded the line and tied it to the hook to make sure it stayed on during the cast and remained in a position so the hook didnt foul up when i struck. i have fished liver the same way both in the uk and in france with good results and its rare to miss a screaming run.
during the day i changed the length of my hook links, i tried different sized hooks and different sized baits. none of the baits showed any signs that a cray fish had been attacking the bait.
between the pair of us in an 18 hr session we had well over 40 bites with maybe 15 being single toners yet all we had to show for our efforts was a jack pike each.
ive spent hours trying to figure out where we was going wrong, so im hoping that maybe someone on here might have an idea as im almost at my wits end

I do wonder if the bites you're getting are liners.

I've had problems when fishing for carp in shallow water over deep silt and I've found that the solution was to fish a crtically balanced bait. I suspect that the carp were just hoovering up baits and that the hook bait was never reaching the fish's mouth due to its weight. Using 3 artificial casters on a size 14 hook did the job perfectly.

Maybe using slightly smaller baits and trimming the sinking boilie on the snowman to give a very slow sink will improve matters.

Any chub in the venue, they are the worlds best at unhittable runs?

Are there any Eels in the water? Small eels picking up the bait and running with it can be next to impossible to hit.

i can put a lot of the smaller bites down to line bites but on a lot of occasions the reel was backwinding in my experience a line bite dont tend to strip the reel of line at that rate i was also using 2.5oz leads.
as far as i know no chub or eels are in the lake.
i took a walk round the lake yesterday afternoon and a bloke fishing 2 swims down from where i was the day before was having the same problems as i had, though he was being very cagey and wouldnt discuss his terminal tackle so im still none the wiser

Fish trailing lines are great for giving unhitable runs but thats alot of fish trailing lines. Unless the unhittable runs are a mix of different issues, trailers and eels for example.

Out of interest are there alot of small carp? I'm taking hand sized fish.