At last a river carp... shame I didnt catch it!!

Took my brother out for an evening on the the Trent, I'd decided to fish opposite the peg I had been overnighting in on the pads,  There was plenty of space for two people and it could be fished on a day ticket (if anyone claimed the ticket money... it was raining... they didnt!!)

We arrived at about 6pm, to a bit of light rain and both put spicy prawn and shrimp boilies out on one rod, then fished maggot feeder on another. Bites were slow in coming, though eventually I picked up my first gudgeon of the season.

As the light faded the feeder rods were switched to lower maintenance approaches, Matt went on to a pair of 10mm halibut pellets on a hair rig and I decided to try a big bunch of redworms, legered on a size 12. The boilies hadn't had a touch.
 At around 20:45 the starlit on Matts halibut rod began to dance signalling a take and he struck into a fish. It headed downstream towards him before rolling on the surface, turning and beginning to strip some line off the clutch. Once it had tired I stood prepared to do the netting duties, and as the beam of my headtorch illuminated the fish I told Matt in no uncertain terms that it was a mirror carp ( I also gave him a string of verbal abuse inappropriate to repeat here, as he had managed to pick up a carp on my bait, in a swim i'd chosen after less than three hours, when I was approaching 80 hours of trying for the same result). I also made a right hash of netting the fish, mainly because the margin was too shallow to properly sink the net, though perhaps my subconcious was trying to knock the carp off...
 It looked like it might be a double, and the scales went past 10, but once the weight of the net was subtracted it fell just short at 9lb14oz.

Once i'd taken some snapshots it was my turn for some action as a take on the worms was struck, and after a few seconds the hook came adrift from what felt like a decent fish. I was therefore suprised to find a bleak on the hook at the end of the retrieve. Mortally wounded it had clearly been grabbed by a predator just as it was hooked. As it was clear the fish was a gonner, I dispatched it quickly with a bash to the head and switched the terminal takle to something more appropriate, terminating in a single size 2.
I told Matt that I was about to catch a zander, he was dubious...
I mutilated the fishy corpse, chopping off the tail to shorten the bait,  removing a few strips of skin and ripping some holes to maximise flavour leak off. Then the unfortunate bleak was then given a burial at sea in the dark and dangerous depths and the baitrunner brake turned to its lowest setting for near zero resistance approach... would the unseen assassin succumb to the trap?. It was only a few minutes before I got a very hesitant take which i tried my hardest to cock up. By failing to properly disengage the freespool my strike resulted in a spinning spool which overran and left me in a tangled mess. Fortunately, with some illumination and assistance from my bro I was able to get things straightened out, and I guess the zander didnt know it had been hooked until I tightened down on the fish, at which point it peeled a few feet of line off the tight clutch, a bloody good job it hadn't done that a minute earlier!

I feared that the botched strike might have resulted in a deep hooked fish, however the hook was only an inch or two back and easily removed with just my fingers. After some photos the 3lb 14 oz zander returned to the river to kill another day.
We packed up at 22:30, both happy enough, neither boilie rod had a tap... though I cant help but feel a bit cheated that a carp surrendered itself so quickly to Matt, almost just to goad me! Being stuck on "c" is just getting silly now!