When taking the kitchen sink ends up making a fishing session feel like a military operation, it can be good to scalke things back and just get back to basics - Wychwood's Darryll Slater gives his take on a more simplified approach to going fishing...

The Wychwood Solace SAS (silent alarm system) is our most feature packed, reliable bite alarm set, to date. The small and compact design has been achieved by completely removing the traditional front speaker from the alarm head leaving the job of audible indication to the speaker on the wireless Receiver. Not only does this improve battery life and consumption dramatically, but it also means the alarms are always muted when setting up.

In this piece I want to give you some simple tips to think about regarding your carp care whilst out on the bank this summer.

I think it's safe to say that Covid played a massive part in 2020 and impacted lives all around the world, being self-employed and working in the construction industry I was afraid of an economic collapse and thought a recession would be on the horizon. In fact it was quite the opposite the construction industry just boomed, from the first week in April it was absolutely manic working 10-12 hours per day 7 days a week, just burying myself into work just in case the economy crashed as it wasn't looking good and just wanted to be prepared I case the inevitable happened for myself and my family.

With Carp angling becoming more and more popular over the past couple of years in Wales, the chance of catching a Welsh whacker in the most picturesque of venues is becoming more available to many anglers.

As a lifelong angler who is so used to having pretty much unlimited freedom and making my own choices to being told I couldn’t go fishing, after thirty years of pretty much doing what I want to when I want to made me feel uneasy to say the least when I first heard the news.

Although I’m relatively young at 23 to be targeting big carp, it’s been a passion for the last 10 years. This whole time I’ve very lucky to have a dad who fishes and supports my angling addiction.

I have been asked to write about my thoughts on short session fishing and watercraft. Now I don’t profess to be an expert on watercraft by any stretch of the imagination. I think of watercraft as being that 6th sense; understanding the carp, knowing where they are when there are no signs of activity and almost being able to pre-empt or predict where they are going to feed. This is an area of weakness for me as I can recount many occasions where I have got this wrong. However one thing that I really enjoy with my fishing is observation.

It has really been awesome conditions the past week and the S word really doesn’t feel too far away so with this, here are my top 5 tips to give you a better chance of putting more fish on the bank as the carp start to wake up this Spring!

As It’s still quite cold with the nights frosty and the water temperature low, choosing the right water is paramount. I find the shallower water's better with the carp well catchable, especially with a lighter more bitty approaches meaning scaling things down and using smaller baits, naturals etc..

If your winter has been slow on the fish front there is always a chance at nicking a bonus bite so here are a few tips that may just swing it in your favour!

Zak's top tactics for locating carp as the season changes from winter to spring.