Danny Fairbrass: Entrepreneur & Successful Carp Angler

I wouldn’t say I have a single angling mentor, although I talk to Darrell Peck a lot, because he simplifies the whole situation, so much. I’m influenced by anyone who’s good, on any venue I’m fishing. I’ve been in the game a long time, and when you have a Damian Clarke, a Tom
Dove, a Neil Spooner, a Tom Stokes and a Darrell Peck, you kind of have it covered.

The greatest assets an angler can have are their eyes. Forget all the money we spend on gear; anglers blank because they don’t use their eyes.

There’s nothing I need that’s angling-related but haven’t got. It might be something Damian (Clarke) has, perhaps, but he never shows me anything!

I don’t replace gear just because I can… I’m using Basias that have black bits hanging off them, but I use kit until it’s spent. When you design tackle, why would you want stuff? I want to design it. I’ve got a frying pan-cum-omelette pan, and the non-stick coating on it is absolutely fantastic. It has a fold-away handle and it’ll be part of our cookware range in a year, or two years’ time, once it’s been thoroughly tested. I don’t go into tackle shops and buy stuff. I’ll go into the Tackle Box in Kent (hello to all the boys there), I’ll get my box of gas, and that’s about it. That’s what I buy from a tackle shop. I’m not a magpie, as such, when it comes to tackle.

The last thing I bought and loved was a Power Porter. That was a few years ago, and I wouldn’t be without it. That’s it, really. Half of what I fish with is in development. Take the landing nets that we’re due to bring out. I’ve been using them for four years. They were designed by Damian, so they’re right. You pick one up and think, Man, these are next level! How did we use those things that bent in half every time we landed one? 

I’m in a very privileged position, and I can tell manufacturers exactly how I want something, like our Polar Kombats. Over the last two winters I’ve worn the salopette version. There’s just one pair, and they have a big burn hole on one leg where I caught them on my stove. They’re not waterproof, but they’re showerproof. They’re designed to be part of your layered, cold-weather clothing, and because they go up your back, they keep your kidney area warm, and your lower back. I sleep in them. They’re brilliant, and if we hadn’t brought them out and someone else had made them, I might have bought them. When you design your own stuff and you bring something out before anyone else has thought of it, why would you go and buy something?

If I had time on my hands I’d be dead! I never have time on my hands, and I arrange my life that way. I now have a whole month when I won’t be fishing, having just done a load of filming. The fish have just spawned, but I don’t fish in June or July. I don’t want to catch carp when they’ve just spawned. I go away with the family during the summer, but my fishing will be planned for when I return. Every fishing day I’ve arranged until the end of the year is on a planner. Every day is marked, and I’ll go on those days, no matter what. It’s Embryo Benelux next week, and I’ll be looking at waters in Holland and Belgium. Then it’s Embryo Italy the week after. I have the Tackle Box social after that, and then I’m with the family for a while. That’s how my life is. I don’t want time on my hands.

Rewinding time, I was always happiest on Elstow, in the Stick, with my left-hand rod on the short bar, on the tree of two halves, and the two right-hand rods on the plateau. That would’ve been 2007 or 2008.

In my bait bag you will always find too many pop-ups! I always take too many hookbaits with me, and that gives me too many choices. I’m always looking for the next big thing—and I have found some next big things, so to speak, by doing that. I have bottom baits, pop-ups and wafters with me, in the bait I’m going to be using, and contrasting baits as well. I have plastic corn to tip my baits with, and I take experimental bits and bobs. I’ll use these on one of the rods if I’m getting bites, and will see how they work.

There have been so many game-changing moments for me over the years, but I’ll mention a recent one—there’s been another since which I won’t talk about, but it will come out at some point. Cynics might think this one is a plug, but never mind. Two winters ago I had a week when I couldn’t go fishing. I had to attend hospital for tests on several different days. I’d been doing well, and during one session had caught four fish to 34lb.

I have a four-metre tank in my back garden. It’s 800cm high and 700cm wide. At the time, I had eight fish in it that had come from an Embryo stock pond. I was growing them on before putting them in an Embryo lake. During the week I couldn’t fish, I tested baits and rigs on the carp in my tank. It was really mild. It was around 10°C every day, and I was gutted because I couldn’t fish. I gave them sweetcorn, flaked maize, a crumbed winter boilie called Fibre, and crumbed peanut which I’d soaked in salt water and then boiled. I gave them exactly the same quantity of each, each day, at exactly the same time and in the same place in the tank. I then observed their immediate reaction and noted how much had gone after half an hour, an hour, and so on.

The sweetcorn came out top. Their reaction was immediate and they ate every grain within the hour, every time. I introduced just half a cup of bait between eight fish that weighed six to eleven pounds. Flaked maize was next best. Fish love carbohydrate in winter and they loved the flaked maize. The interesting thing about the maize was that they continued to return to it during the whole four hours it took for all the bait to go. If, therefore, you want an immediate reaction and something that will promote prolonged feeding, what two things do you mix together? Sweetcorn and flaked maize.

Then there was the crumbed boilie, which they ate, but it took the full four or five hours for them to eat it all. They would not, however, eat the peanut, not initially. There was no immediate reaction and not until the next morning had it been eaten. I had a captive audience, shall we say, and they couldn’t go anywhere, so they ate it in the end. They obviously didn’t like it, though.

Steve at Mainline had made up a Smart Liquid to match the Fibre boilies. Fibre has its own toffee flavouring that Mainline produce exclusively for themselves. I’d had this liquid for a year and hadn’t used it, and come day five of my experiment, I glugged some flaked maize with it. I thinned it with some hot water and let it all soak for 15 minutes. I put it in the tank, and the cloud was absolutely unbelievable. Initially, the fish backed off, but within five minutes, they were nose-to-nose on it! The day before it had taken the fish four hours to eat it, but within an hour, after it had been glugged with the Smart Liquid, they’d eaten the lot. I also noticed their poo on the bottom of the tank, like little tubes of fish paste. After they’d eaten the flaked maize, they ate their poo that laid on the bottom!

The tank has a baffle, and this creates a vacuum which draws solids from the bottom for filtration. I watched two of the fish try to force their noses up the baffle to get any remnants of their own waste that hadn’t been sucked through. They went nuts! It was December, and these fish were swimming up and and down at a million miles per hour, flanking on the bottom. When they show over your spot, it’s because they’re excited, and turned on by your bait. That’s how these fish were: massively turned on! I had half a tin of sweetcorn left, and wondered whether they’d eat that as well. I put it in, and yep, that went, too. Within 15 minutes, the whole lot was gone.

Going back to where I’d been fishing, on my second session, I’d blanked. For both sessions, I had crumbed peanut in my mix. You couldn’t use tiger nuts, so being crafty, I thought a tiny sprinkling of peanut might get them going. After what I’d learned, however, no chance!

The next day of my experiment, I glugged the crumbed boilie, and again, that went within an hour. The day after that I glugged the peanut, but they still refused to eat it. Peanut is high in protein and high in fat, so it’s all right in the summer, but after my experiments, I’ll never use it in winter again. At that time of year they want food that’s high in carbohydrates and low in fat, because of the temperature of the water.

The following week I went back to the lake, absolutely buzzing—still with my white coat on and the four different-coloured pens in the pocket after my experiments! I found the fish and got on them. I was fishing to a little trough at range, and the crosswind took the first of my planned eight lots of bait off to the right-hand side after I’d cast left and hit the clip too high in the air. My second cast was low and it didn’t catch the wind at all, so that went ten yards to the right of the spot. I was fishing a trough six feet wide, and already I had two lots of bait twenty yards apart! I had twelve casts with the Spomb before I had everything right. I then had another ten casts before I managed to get two rods placed correctly, because I was fishing one of the three short after seeing a fish show. I honestly thought I’d mucked it all up.

Bites on this particular water normally came the next morning, rather than at night. I was on the phone to Tom Rossiter, who manages our sponsored anglers, when the bobbin on the left-hander lifted and dropped back. It was just two hours into the session and I made my excuses to Tom, thinking I’d been done and that I needed to redo the rod. With that, off it went. It was the fish I was after, a carp known as Lumpy. It’s off the scale and one of the best I’ve ever caught, with massive, silver plates all over its body. On the scales it went 41lb.

Just as I slipped the fish back, the middle rod went, and that was a thirty-pounder. Then the right-hand rod went, and that was a twenty. This was all the same afternoon, on a water where I’d not had a bite on previous sessions until the following morning. I had so many fish that winter, and I’m utterly convinced that Smart Liquid has something in it that turns them on. Everywhere I’ve used it, it’s been effective, be it on a Masterclass in Germany, when I’ve soaked boilies or wherever, and it’s now always in my armoury.

What I learned about the Smart Liquid, then, was a game-changing moment. I went to Gigantica after that and had a massive hit using sweetcorn, flaked maize, crumbed Fibre boilie and a bit of Smart Liquid. I’ve known Steve Morgan at Mainline for thirty years, but I’ve still never been to the factory and I don’t know what’s in the baits. If you don’t ask, you don’t have to be told, “No.” He did tell me, though, that it was like releasing a million spores of attraction when you use it, so more fool me for not doing so for a year.

One angler I’d have loved to fish with was Rod Hutchinson, when he was in his prime. On Savay, there were the funniest and most gifted anglers alive—I don’t know whether my liver would have lasted, mind. Rod was so inspirational, and I must have read The Carp Strikes Back about fifty times. I read it so often that it fell to bits. I wrote to him and told him, and he sent me a signed replace-ment. I would have been about 15 at the time.

The thing I find most irritating about anglers is their lack of respect for those fishing next to them… casting into their neighbour’s swim, for instance, or how some will thrash it to death with a marker float at bite time. Don’t bait up at seven; wait until eleven o’clock and do it then, and don’t bait up just because I bait up. I’ve had some say that they’ll do everything I do. I’ll bait up because I need to. They might be doing so for the wrong reason.

 Things I’ve lost that I wish I still had would be 16 rods, 16 reels and a load of kit. I didn’t lose it all, it was stolen. It was stored in a container at the original Korda site, where all the sheds were. The kit had great sentimental value, and included the rods I’d won the British Carp Angling Championships with, with Damian. I’d like to have had the 13ft Infinity rods in a case at work. I’m not sentimental, really. I don’t have mascots or lucky charms and I don’t believe in luck. I’ve done so much personal development training, and if you give any value to luck, you’re giving away your power and control over the situation.

I blanked at Gigantica once because I fished like an idiot after seeing seven single magpies on the way down there. They ruined me. How does a black and white bird determine what I catch? It’s a load of rubbish, but some believe in that kind of stuff, like I did. As if the planets that are millions of miles away, say, are going to have a bearing on whether I catch or not… I determine that. If you give any value to that, you lose control, and I’ve learned that. The reason I’ve caught as many fish as I have, is because I’ve dismissed luck from my life, completely.

If I didn’t do what I am doing now, I’d have about 30 clubs, all around the world. I’ve bought decks and my mate, Sam Holt, is going to teach me how to use them. I’m up to about 1,100 Shazams with the list of records I need to buy, and they include everything from super chill-out music, to what I’d call uplifting techno, driving techno, Deep house music and stuff like that. If I’m in the van and I’m not listening to a podcast, or recording stuff myself about positive things that have happened in my life recently, I’m listening to techno or Deep house.