14 May 2017 – Catch report from: Ian and Caroline

Matt’s one on one tutorial

After the compulsory glass of wine and lake tour, we left them to recover from the very long journey. I returned the next morning at 10am to do a half day tutorial which would focus on some key areas that Caroline wanted to concentrate on. Caroline chose mainline knot tying and testing, and tying simple yet highly effective bottom bait rigs. Ian wanted a refresher on hook sharpening and how to tie a good strong stiff hinge rig. They also both wanted to improve their casting skills so we covered leading around, casting to the clip, feature finding with a bare lead and feeling for the donk. As novice anglers they haven’t had enough practice with fish handling skills so they also asked me to cover that.

They only started fishing sometime that evening and got their first pickup at 12.30 am. With a new PB of 31lbs in the book, they decided to call it a night and wound in. The next day a very cold North wind also cut the fishing short and they retreated to the lodge to relax with a bottle of wine. With bites hard to come by during the day they realised that night fishing was the only option so they rested during the day on Wednesday but fished through the night. This time they managed two pickups, one from a nice 29lbs carp and the other from one of our monster catfish.

Ian is ex services, tall and strong, but it was all he could do to hang onto this cat. It took all his strength to stop him going through the bridge which he did but finally the 25lb braided hooklink gave out and the fish was lost after about 30 minutes. This is the 3rd 25lb hooklink failure we’ve seen this year so if you really want to bank everything you hook then 45lb hooklinks for both cats and carp is the only way. I’ve seen plenty of carp caught on 45lb hooklink so it’s very much worth considering.

Tired from their night’s efforts and happy with their results they went back to fishing the days and unfortunately the fish just didn’t want to know during the daylight hours.

The thing about Beausoleil is that you can have whatever you want from it, fish hard and work for them or fish light and just let the bird song take all your cares away. As always it was great to see them and spend time on the bank with them. We very much look forward to welcoming them back for their session in September.