On the 22nd of October I decided to fish somewhere completely different the usual commercial carp water: a natural reservoir called “Bottoms” in Tintwistle (Derbyshire). It is fifty acres in size, with average depths of forty eight feet. Bottoms reservoir is a manmade lake, constructed between 1865-77, by John Frederick Bateman, as part of the Longendale chain to supply water from the River Etherow to the urban areas of Greater Manchester.
The fishery rights did belong to a club called Glossop Angling, but due to the cost of holding such a substantial amount of water, it had to be let go, therefore is it currently free fishing. Some of the pegs are unfishable due to the steep banking’s and rocky areas, but there are some more accessible areas to fish. I decided to fish the side of the damn wall where the two waters meet each other. It was a bit of a climb down, but with only a little struggle I managed to get to my peg. You can see six clear pegs on the water’s edge, and I decided to fish the first one, closest to the damn wall.
I placed my box about a foot into the water, just to give me slightly more reach advantage. I decided to set up two pole lines, one at 12 metres, in around 11ft of water, and fished a 1 gram Preston PB Silver 2, with an Olivet to a .11 reflow power line, with a .10 hook link to a size 20 carbon match hook. For the same swim, I set an identical rig, but with a bigger float (1.25 gram to a size 18 hook – just in case the wind picked up).My second line was 8 metres to my left, in about 7ft of water. I used a Preston series 6 .80gr with Olivet to a .11 reflow power line and a .10 size 20 hook. Bait for the day was caster and maggot for the hook and my ground bait mix contained Bait-Tech pro-natural, Sonubait black and sensors supreme ground bait, mixed with 1kg of black soil to bulk it out. I mixed caster, dead reds and hemp in my mix.
I started with four orange-sized balls to my 12 metre line and fed two balls to my 8 metre line. Once my swims had settled, I fished maggot two my 12metre line and straight away got bites from small fish, so after around 7-8 tiny roach I decided to try caster. I had to wait a little longer for bites but when they came I was rewarded with a larger stamp of fish. Through the day I swapped between both swims, catching steady, but soon realised the fish did not want to be on the deck so I shallowed up my 8 metre line and moved 6 metres from the water’s edge and fed a pot of sloppy bread mix through the waters column. I added a 6mm punched bread disc to the hook and straight away the float was going under, and for the next 40 minutes it was a fish a chuck.
With the other lads ready to go
home, we called it a day after around 5.5 hours, and readied ourselves for the
trip back up the hill to the car. With a total weight of around 6lb of roach, a
bonus trout and a couple of stripes, I would say it’s a great natural water to
fish. Already looking forward to next time now I have had a taster of how it
fishes.
