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Off the beaten track Yes, the first in an exclusive new series that will feature a whole host of unknown monsters appears in this issue. If you haven’t heard about it, then you must have been living on the moon. Since I announced it in Big Carp 173, everyone has been talking about it and certain websites have been inundated with emails. So just in case you missed it, here’s what happened and what’s coming up… A few months ago, following the death of the Black Mirror and my comments in Big Carp about ‘the end of an era’ I had a call: “Don’t be disheartened, there are still loads of big’uns out there, unnamed, uncaught and in waters like The Mere.” “Oh yeah,” I said, “We’ve all heard about that secret estate lake full of proper old English warriors, but I’ve never come across it.” “Well, I have!” came the reply. “In fact I’ve found a few of them!” We got chatting and it appears that this guy had gone out looking for unfished waters, just like we used to do years ago, and found several with big uncaught carp in them. Years ago we had the close season for these little adventures. We would set off armed with an ordnance survey map, binoculars, sunglasses and a loaf of bread in the hope that we found some fish and could get them feeding. If we could, then we would decide how best to catch them. It wasn’t poaching. Poaching was always associated with dodgy ‘trout ticklers’ and the like, whereas ‘guesting’ as the great Rod Hutchinson christened it, was always ‘the gentleman’s art’ of fishing where you weren’t really supposed to, but, and a very important but, you were not doing anyone or anything any harm. And that’s of course how The Mere was always fished and how the Black Mirror was always caught. Looking for waters in the close season is what normal carp anglers did; we couldn’t fish as there was a close season, so we looked for fish. Today that art is all but forgotten.