Happy Days PB - Short Session Carp

Christopher Haswell was born on New Year's Day 1953 in Farnborough Hospital, Kent. He was the youngest of three children and, along with sister, Sheila and brother, Peter, attended Princes Plain infants/junior school then went to Raglan/Hayesford Secondary School. He grew up in Bromley, staying there until he moved to West Malling at the age of forty. He now lives in a country area just outside Maidstone. He has four children, George, 23 years old, Harry, 22 years old, Freddie, 16 years old and a daughter, Carmella, who is 14. The family has two standard poodles, Tommy and Hannah, plus Leo the tom cat and a pond full of koi and other carp.

He is a stone, marble and ceramic tiler by trade.

Chris started fishing as a young lad at Keston Fish Ponds, where he learned his angling skills by catching roach, rudd, perch, tench and pike. He determined to catch one of the large carp he saw and soon crossed paths with two seasoned carp fishers, Steve Edwards and Ken Rowley, who saw in him the burning ambition to catch a Keston carp. They took him under their wings and set him on a path towards a lifetime of carp fishing.

He became the youngest person ever to join the British Carp Study Group, enabling him to join Ashlea Pool in 1970 with Ken Rowley. Since those days he has gone on to catch a number of carp in excess of 40lb. This by using his own tried and tested rigs and bait - detailing these, and the reasons for using them, in this book.

He was at the cutting edge of bait technology when fishing with the Wilton crew in the seventies and from this came his own very successful bait company, which he ran for around twenty-five years. He talks about the effectiveness of certain flavours and ingredients, along with the pitfalls of using 'duff' ingredients in a bait.

Amongst the many waters he has fished are Ashlea, Redmire, Crayfish Pool, Yateley, Horton, Wraysbury and Dorchester Lagoon but he now prefers waters nearer to his home. After all, as mentioned in the book, why drive past waters that hold massive carp to fish somewhere a two hour drive away?

Chris is quite emphatic that much of his success, considering how little time he fishes, is because he believes in doing something different on his chosen water and not following the trends of other anglers. That chain of thought doesn't always pay off, but when it does the rewards can be massive.

Along with his love of carp fishing comes his love of music and he has belonged to various bands for almost as long as he has been fishing. In the final chapter he talks about his involvement in the music business throughout his life.

There is much to be learned from this book, even by today's hardened carp angler, about rigs, bait and bait ingredients and from his observations of carp behaviour over rigs and bait.

Chris has been carp fishing for forty-seven years so why not take advantage of that wealth of knowledge and join him on his journey through six decades of carp fishing, trials, ...