The Thinking Tackle UNCUT lads — Tom Dove, Neil Spooner, Adam Reed and a returning Damian Clarke — sat down for episode 40 with a single, unavoidable headline: UK carp lakes are kicking out 50-pounders this spring at a rate that has even the Korda brand-new-50 bell ringing.
"This spring has been ridiculous for our boys," Tom Dove said early in the episode. "There's a lot more 50-pounders cropping up now, haven't there?"
The room agreed. Adam Reed went further. "Some places, in my opinion, [are now] for 50s, not 40s," he said, before Tom added the line of the episode for any UK angler who's been sitting on a target water for years: "40s are 30s now, aren't they? Yeah, they're getting bigger and bigger."
That shift was the through-line of an episode largely built around Spooner's bag of recent fish. He brought back a 41 lb 8 oz carp from Clearwater on the same dark, scaly fish he'd photographed there once before — landed on an adjustable zig fished five feet under, in a swim where his three rods were sitting at four, five and six feet under the surface. "I stuck a picture up. That's a spring marker, isn't it?" he said. "At that point when I landed that, I'd had seven bites from that lake and that had been three of them."
A few hours later the same swim threw up another. "It's the other, it was the other bigger, a fish called the Sergeant, and that had been out about six weeks previous at 42. Dropped a bit of weight, but it was still 40 lb 4 oz."
A quick guest spell at Brazos added the cherry. "Got there in the evening, caught two before dark. Got up at first light to redo the rods and I had six fish between six in the morning and eight," Spooner said. "Then it just died. No matter what I did, they'd obviously moved. I had a 30-pounder after dark and then just before light on the last morning, I've had the most ridiculous battle with this fish. And that thing popped up which is not only a mega carp but it was another 40 — pound 4."
The podcast headline most non-anglers will see, though, is the marathon. Spooner ran the 2026 London Marathon two weeks before recording, raising £5,825.20 for charity. The whole gang — minus Damian, who was abroad — turned up on the day, missing him for most of the route because of a wardrobe mix-up: Tom and Adam were scanning the field for a yellow Lennox top while Spooner ran the whole thing in a bright cord-green 802 t-shirt.
"It's the best thing I've ever done. The hardest thing I've ever done," Spooner said. "I got to about mile 19 thinking this is never going to finish. It didn't hit the wall or anything. I'd fueled correctly. But you realise how hard it is. And when I got to the finish line, if someone had been there with some paraffin and a light, I would have just burnt me shoes and it would have been done." Half an hour later he had entered the next year's ballot — and signed Tom up too.
That handshake turned into a public bet. If Spooner catches a UK 50-pounder before day 100 of his current campaign — he's currently on day 57 — Tom Dove will commit to running the London Marathon with him next year. "All right, well, I've got nothing to lose, have I?" Tom replied, before Adam Reed locked in to run the race with them too. "It would be good if you're doing it because you can train me," Tom said. As a fallback, Tom may instead be roped into a charity wing walk strapped to the top of a biplane — "I will do it, but only if we raise a lot of money. I'm not doing it for like five grand or nothing" — with a 25-grand target floated for the comments to vote on.
The other big topic was the recent Korda Dura film, which crossed 250,000 views inside its first week. Damian Clarke landed a 60 lb-plus mirror on the trip, while Tom Dove and Adam fished two weeks for a single bite between them. "It's hard to keep it flowy and keep the audience interested enough to watch it right the way through when not a lot's happening," Tom said of the edit. "Damian catching that 60-pounder, that's a lifetime's worth of work for him. He's never had a trip like that on there and he's never caught a fish that big."
The lads admit the Dura is hard fishing — Tom called it "so far out of the back of my mind" when asked if he'd return — but the consensus on the boat was that it's the lake every UK carper at least dreams about. "It's like the dream capture," Tom said.
It is, on every count, an episode that captures where serious UK carp fishing sits in May 2026: bigger fish than at any point most of the room can remember, a generation of anglers running marathons between sessions, and a bet that may yet stick Tom Dove on a start line he never planned to cross.