A great fishing holiday for this lovely couple with eight carp to 31lbs.
Choice of 30lbs mainline and reel: Daiwa Sensor on Shimano Big Baitrunner Long Casts
This week we welcomed a lovely couple from Warrington for their first French fishing holiday. Mark is an experienced and skilled carper but had been out of the game for nine years. His wife Joanne doesn’t actually fish much herself but loves being out on the bank with Mark. On Monday, I was delighted to hear that Mark had had a double take at around midnight the night before and banked a mid and upper twenty. Despite his long absence from carp fishing, the skills were still there and he was delighted to get off the mark.
Mark had followed our advice and upped his mainline to 30lb Daiwa Sensor. This is an inexpensive line, very thick at 0.57mm and very tough. I wouldn’t recommend this line for anything other than a big bit Shimano reel and Mark’s Long Casts took the line without issue. After a few hours in the water it settles down nicely, hangs limp through the rings and sinks well. We found that the best knot to connect a swivel to it is a well tied, three turn, tucked blood. We found other knots such as the four turn blood, the Palomar, the uni knot and the double grinner to be vastly inferior and the line broke well below the stated strength. The heavy line in no way reduced Mark’s chances with the carp, in fact I believe that it only enhanced them.
On the rig and bait front, all Mark’s carp were caught on the Beausoleil home made 16mm cork ball popups fished alongside strategic amounts of our 24mm bottom baits. Bottom baits on the hair were soon targeted by the C2’s but once again the stiff hinged rig with a 2” chod rig section, in combination with an inline lead fished in the Beausoleil style proved deadly for the larger carp. I’ll now handover the keyboard to Mark who sent me this message following the capture of The Big Apple at the end of the week which summarises his experience better than I could!
“New York, New York! Cheers Matt, he is a beauty and he really made a mess of my other rods during the 4am fight managing to wrap around the other two lines. Every time he saw the net, he went mental. I hooked him on the bar off the island point and he instantly ran down to ‘no carp corner’. This ended with me jammed in between the tree on my right and the other two rods on my left for the netting process. I couldn’t even keep the rod up in the air due to the branches above and couldn’t allow him to run to my left due to the other rods. God knows how I landed him. All ended well though and when I placed him back into the water after weighing, he flapped his tail covering my face in water, very refreshing!”
Mark was really buzzing and rightly so. Like many anglers he badly wanted a 30 on his first trip to France and he banked one. Technically and tactically, Mark got everything spot on. He actually stalked two of his carp by laying traps just inches from the bank. The best being an upper twenty. This year has been an excellent year for those that have made the effort to stalk them from the margins and the best carp thus far was a whooping 38lbs! Mark spent hours watching the carp’s every move and carefully laid small traps for them to induce the mistake. Mark paid a great deal of attention to hook sharpness and rigs and spent a number of hours each day making sure that everything was as good as it could possibly be. The phrase “it’ll do” is most definitely not in his vocabulary and the results bear witness to that with eight carp banked out of eight bites without any losses which is very rare. It was an absolute pleasure to meet them both and I know that Mark is determined to return for more Beausoleil magic!
Catch report & Feedback from:
Mark & JoanneDates at Beausoleil: 17th to the 24th September 2016
Number of anglers: 1
Brief details of your catches:
8 fish in total7 x Mirror Carp: 31lbs 2oz, 28lbs 4oz, 27lbs 12oz, 25lbs 8oz, 24lbs 15oz, 23lbs 14oz, 19lbs
1 x Common Carp: 25lbs 2oz
Zero losses
