31 October 2015 – Catch Report: Niels and family

Pro Line’s Niels Van Vooren samples the delights of an English style estate lake in France and catches some beautiful carp to 37lbs!

This week we welcomed a new group from Belgium to the venue. Niels is a consultant for Pro Line which is a massive European carp brand based in Holland. Niels was born into carp fishing and has fished exclusively for carp for the last 12 years. What’s incredible is that Niels is only 21 years of age has a PB of 30.2kg! Niels loves his carp fishing and works very hard at it doing 3 over nighters per week back home. His drive and energy are infectious and he’s a very nice guy too! Beausoleil could never be described as a circuit water so we were surprised that he and his family had chosen to travel 6 hours to our quiet corner of France. Despite his talent and accomplishments, Neil has very little experience fishing heavily pressured estate type lakes and we were very interested to see how he got on.

If you keep an eye on social media you’ll know that carp fishing across France has generally been pretty slow this month. Everyone has their own theory on this and I’m not going to get into the subject here but no matter what the conditions, I always believe that there is at least one bite to be had every 24hrs. It took 48 hrs before Niels made first contact and found a switch to stiff hinged rigs in the margins worked for him. He then caught a carp a day until the carp decided to play elsewhere. His tactics certainly seemed to target the better carp as he landed three nice 30’s. As is often the case the carp headed off to a corner that was unfishable from where Niels had positioned himself and that was the end of the action. Hindsight is always 20 x20 of course but it takes years of experience on a water to know when and where to move to keep the action coming. Beausoleil is a tricky venue to fish solo and I look forward to having another dabble for them myself next week. Niels confessed that it was probably the toughest French session he’d ever had but loved it even more because of it. He’d always dreamed of fishing an English estate lake and although, obviously, the lake is in France it really does feel very English! Niels learnt a lot during the week and took some great photos and video footage for his sponsors. It was an absolute pleasure to welcome him and his family members to the venue and we do hope to see them again one day.