CHAPTER 4

Kieran Hopkinson endures relentless bream and an illegal rave in his pursuit of Scotland’s largest, and perhaps most elusive mirror carp…

BY KIERAN HOPKINSON

The final push meant wading waistdeep through a swamp with all my gear held above my head… all that effort, just for better line-lay!

PHOTOGRAPHY KIERAN HOPKINSON AND FRIENDS

IT’S FUNNY HOW SOME THINGS WORK OUT. After a few years of living and studying in Denmark, I returned to Scotland in October 2018 with the intention of quickly leaving again. I was planning to move in with my girlfriend in Holland, but with suitable Dutch jobs proving hard to come by, my stay in Scotland ended up being much longer than planned. Frustratingly, it felt like my whole life had been put on hold, but the delay at least offered me a chance to chase some of the fishing-related dreams I’d put aside when I’d moved abroad a few years earlier.

CREATING YOUR OWN BUZZ

At the tail end of the year, I briefly resumed my campaign on a stretch of canal that had once held a withered old common known as the General. Some years earlier, I’d tried my hand here with some success, even managing to bank a few of the stretch’s larger residents, but the big girl had remained elusive to me and everyone else fishing there. Perhaps others had seen her and had kept quiet, but judging by the catch reports, we’d all been catching the same ones and it was clear that the stock had dwindled over the years. Being over 50-yearsold, and with the canal heavily exposed to otter predation, I felt in my heart that the main prize was probably long gone. I was so certain, in fact, that I struggled to find the buzz to continue, and found myself making plans for pastures new, come the spring. It’s a long old stretch of canal, and the General might still be hiding somewhere, but a few years on she still hasn’t slipped up.

Another of those dreams was to fish a neglected gravel quarry where my mate, Paul, had caught a dirty great mirror known as Paw Print back in 2013. It was Scotland’s first mirror to top thirty-pounds, and there were also a few others in there on the missing list, including a big old common which had always been a few pounds heavier than Paw Print, way back when they had been mere twenties.

‘The Quarry’, as we knew it, had been fished by some good anglers since Paul’s successful campaign, but after a few big summer floods and too many otter sightings, those from the big carp scene seemed to lose interest and had drifted on, perhaps assuming that the big one had perished one way or another. A few upper-doubles had been caught since, and one angler had lost a heavy fish in 2016, but nobody I talked to seemed to have seen the big one for some time.

It’s peculiar, but the carp in this pit have a bit of a reputation for rarely giving themselves away; hardly ever fizzing, showing, or basking in the sunshine. All things considered, they’re just carp, and shouldn’t behave too differently from those in any other water, but I think certain environmental aspects of the Quarry allowed these ones to live out their lives relatively unnoticed. There were probably only five carp in there, which made the place hard as nails, and the notorious head of big, boilie-eating bream made it impossible to keep three rods fishing at times. The water was very deep, seemed to hold a permanent thermocline, and was regu- larly stained by tannins that made visibility poor. There was also very little information to go by, save a few hushed whispers that the big one might still be around.