I have only ever been lucky enough to have been a member of one carp syndicate and that was some years ago. There were no rules regarding publicity and the management certainly didn’t mind because the syndicate leader wrote a couple of articles about the place, but generally the members liked to keep it a bit ‘off the radar’. I think another reason there was very little publicity is because the fish weren’t really big enough to make much of a splash, and with the odd exception, it’s generally all about size in most fishing magazines.
Around the same time I was also fishing a club water, which did contain some big carp and although quite a few anglers had their catches printed in magazines, they did not name the water. Again there were no rules about it. The reasons for keeping tight lipped at this one were really down to an unwritten code of conduct whereby, although the club was open to anybody, albeit with limited night ticket numbers, the lake was regarded as quite a special place and the feeling was that the anglers fishing there didn’t want it to become too much of a ‘circuit water’. It was generally considered that if people found out about it, either through introduction, or through their own resourcefulness, then that was obviously fair enough, but shouting its name from the rooftops was not really ‘the done thing’. Yes, plenty of catch pictures have been published from this water but it just doesn’t get named in the press.
I do sometimes write about my fishing and I have published pictures and written about both these waters but when doing so have given them fictitious names. Regretfully however, I may have slipped up a couple of times with the syndicate water
– a bit careless and stupid of me, but this was not in any mainstream carp magazine and, as I have said, not against any rules.