Big Carp Legends: Dave Lane

By Dave Lane

Dave Lane

To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Big Carp magazine, this series of books entitled ‘Big Carp Legends’ will encompass the greatest names in carp fishing history over the past two decades. The content of the books in this series will be a mixture of articles from the archives of Big Carp, life histories of famous anglers and original articles specially commissioned for the series and never before published. One by one these books will build into the greatest collection of modern day carp fishing history ever printed; a collection that every serious carp angler will want to own.

His early days on the Chichester gravel pits gave Dave just the edge he needed when he concentrated on the Colne Valley pits, Harefield and Pit 4, but it was Dave’s move to Wraysbury and Horton that put him in the record books, catching more forties than any Englishman had ever caught in a season, and his first fifty pounder, Mary.

Conningbrook saw Dave with his second fifty a short while later, but this was only the beginning of a life spent chasing the UK’s biggest carp. The Eye was virtually unheard of when Dave made it number three, and what an awesome creature it turned out to be, without doubt a worthy front cover for this volume.

Several Cambridge pits fell to Dave’s approach and soon the Grey Lady made it four. The whole of the carp world knew when Dave made it five, and what fish it was going to be. The icing on the cake, the Black Mirror from the notorious Mere had seen Dave achieve the impossible – five English fifties.

This special addition to the Legends series features several chapters with tales never written about before and many, many pictures never previously published. Now’s your chance to sit back and hear the full story of Dave’s amazing carp life for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BigCarpMagazine
• Release date: Nov 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9780951512784

Book preview

Epub cover

Contents

Big Carp Legends

Big Carp Legends

Dave Lane

First published in 2011

By Bountyhunter Publications

© Bountyhunter Publications 2011

All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 978-0-9515127-8-4

Printed in Great Britain

Foreword by Rob Maylin

I first met Dave when I was fishing Savay in the eighties. He would turn up in the evening at the Horse and Barge pub with his dog, having been fishing on either Harefield or Pit 4 on the opposite side of the canal to Savay. At this time carp anglers from all over the Colne Valley would congregate there, all with their own little stories of the day’s events, and Dave always had a tale to tell. From the Colne Valley he upped sticks, and with dog in tow headed for the Staines area where over a few seasons he had exceptional results on Wraysbury and Horton, breaking record after record as he notched up the forty-pluses. He was the first angler to catch two forties in a season, then three in a season, and so on… His record breaking run did not stop there, as later he was to achieve similar records with fifties this time, until with the capture of the Black Mirror he became the only English angler ever to bank five fifty-pluses – an achievement few anglers will ever achieve.

His results became legendary and featured five of the UK’s favourite carp. It started at Wraysbury with a repeat capture of the once British record Mary, and this time she went fifty-plus. In pursuit of record breakers it was in fact long term record Two Tone that set the angling world alight for Dave again when she tipped the scales at fifty-plus. Dave had his eye on the Black Mirror, but the Mere’s inherent problems held him back. A grapevine whisper of a huge Berkshire lump sent Dave off on his travels again, and after a fantastic campaign at Sonning, Dave banked the Eye, a rare capture indeed.

Across country to Cambridgeshire next, and a brief sortie after the Grey Lady saw her bring his total up to four. Now was Dave’s chance to complete the set, and with precision timing he returned to the Mere for one last concentrated push, and when he caught it, the whole world knew about it. Dave had achieved what no man thought possible – five fifties, an achievement that has pushed Dave into the world of legends, the reason he was a perfect choice for this series of books.

Dave has written two books before so we were careful when putting this volume together not to simply repeat what he’s said before. I think this has been achieved remarkably, and the fact that most of the pictures have never been published before has added strength to this important addition to the series. Here is Dave’s life story, starting as a naïve child on the waters of Sussex, and going step-by-step through his remarkable angling life until we join the Dave Lane we love in 2011. Recently married, very settled in his Suffolk home, heavily involved as always in carp and carp fishing, and most importantly, still out there doing it. He has just caught a much sought after big common and is concentrating on new mystery venue, which is thought to contain an absolute monster. I’m sure you wish Dave all the best in his new quest, as I do.

The most remarkable fact behind all these captures is that Dave has always held down a fulltime job, is a dedicated family man with kids, and normally he only fishes two nights a week; he’s not a full timer as many might imagine.

So now is your chance to sit back and read how it all began, and how it became a lifelong obsession.

29lb 4oz and 29lb 8oz common – taken within minutes of each other. Truly Harfield haulin’.

Introduction

Churners and Tank Aerials

I hooked into this fish, pulled it out of the pads and bundled it into our tiny landing net. It was a wildie, about 2½lb, and it was absolutely monstrous!

I suppose I first cast a rod in 1965 or something like that, which is a few decades ago. I started off like most people do, fishing for perch and roach and anything that swam past really, and a lot of gudgeon got sore lips during my youth. I suppose it must have been about 1970 when I started fishing a little park lake just up the road, which had a lot of carp in it. It was all covered in lily pads, and I started fishing it with a mate of mine who used to live up the street from me, a guy called Ray, who sort of took me under his wing. He was a couple of years older than me so he’d come on a little bit quicker. I used to go down and do nights with him; I was only sort of ten or 11 years old, I suppose. We used to sit there at night fishing with floating crust and he used to catch a few, but I never really used to catch very much; I really was a raw beginner.

I’ll never forget the first time my dad came down to the lily lake with me. Now my dad, he’s gone now bless him, but his idea of night fishing was to take the van down there, get a generator going, get all the leads out and power some big sort of sodium arc lights hanging in the trees. We set up on this point, which was fully illuminated and we had a BBQ going and a fire and everything. Half way through the night I had a take, and my reel started spinning – it was all churners then, as there were no bait runners or anything. I had this little red… I don’t even know what it was, some sort of Intrepid type reel… and an old solid tank aerial rod. The old reel started spinning, I hooked into this fish, pulled it out of the pads and eventually bundled it into this little tiny landing net.

It was a wildie, and I reckon it was probably about 2½lb, which seemed absolutely monstrous, as I’d only caught rudd and stuff up until then. It was my first proper big fish, although I’d fished for everything else. I’d had a little go for tench, roach, perch etc, but my first specimen fish of 2½lb was a carp. I was absolutely over the moon with it; I ran round telling all my mates, and got everyone to come round and see it, I mean the poor thing was in and out of the keep net about 50 times before it went back.

After that I started going up there without my dad, just with my mate, and used to catch them quite regularly. I got into carp fishing like that really, fishing for wildies. There were loads of wildies around Sussex where I came from, and a lot of the ponds had fish to 3 or 4lb but a big fish was 5lb. We used to fish with free-lined sausage; we used to go in the butchers or just down the shop and buy a packet of sausages and just chop them into little sections about 1½ins long so you’d get about five baits out of each one. We always freelined, putting the hook through, winding the line round and round, and then putting the hook through again. I don’t know why we did that, but we just thought it would help it to stay on during the cast. We learned a bit then even using sausage, and we learned that the fat content of sausages varied greatly. For example one night I couldn’t get Walls sausages, and they were the ones we always caught on; I could only get cheap sausages.

So I got there just after dark, chopped my sausages up, threw a load in as free bait, flicked mine out and attached my bread bobbin. I had a little dough bobbin, and it was twitching and going up and down, but I wasn’t getting any proper bites and it was sort of obvious that something wasn’t right. Anyway, halfway through the night, as always, we had a big fire and speared a few of our baits onto bank sticks so we could cook them in the flames, and eventually curled up near the embers and fell asleep. In the morning when it got light, I fired a few more sausage sections out and flicked my little freeline out. Then I realised what the problem was – cheap sausages have got too much fat in them so they float. Everything I’d put in the night before had just floated off and all night, I’d been fishing a floating sausage on a freeline!

After than I sort of messed about with baits a little bit. I worked on a market stall at the time and they had stuff there called Layers Mash, which is like a chicken feed; it’s like a powdered sort of groundbait really. It’s got bits of corn in it and bits of seed and hemp and whatever in there, and I started buying tubes of sausage meat and mixing this Layers Mash with it to make a ‘special’. I’d started to read a couple of books about carp fishing, but there weren’t very many around at the time. There was Maddocks obviously, with his book ‘Carp Fever’, and I think that was early 70’s. We read in there about using pastes and there was another guy Sharman… what was his first name? George Sharman – that was it, and I read that book as well, but it was really complicated and hard for a young’un to understand.

But anyway, the upside of it was I ended up with this ‘special’, which was basically sausage meat and Layers Mash made into a paste, and I started using that and catching really well on it. I used to catch a lot of fish on that, and I took that on my first proper carp water if you like, which was Tilgate Park Lakes, my local park lakes. I was still always freelining – everything was freelining because the baits were so heavy you couldn’t cast them with a lead setup. For ledgering we would always use ½oz or ¾oz Arlesey bombs, and if you put a big lump of paste on it, it wouldn’t cast; it would just tumble end-over-end, so most of it was simple freelining. Anyway, I sat up there one day and I caught two carp on my new special bait, and one of them was 10½lb, which at the time, in the early 70’s, was a massive fish for me, a really big mirror, as I was about 14 years old or something like that. I think the other one was about 8lb, and I was pretty much hooked after that – that was me into what I thought was serious carp fishing.

Tilgate.

Jenks, Tilgate.

Tilgate.

Tilgate.

Tilgate.

Chapter 1

Carp Fever – The Road to Big Carp Fishing

They showed me a boilie on a hair rig which was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen in my life.

We used to fish Tilgate all the time, all my mates and me, and then one day these two guys turned up, one was called Bob Cooper and the other was called Robin West. I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard of them, but they were way ahead of their game, they really were. They were a nice couple of blokes; they weren’t