Fishing report: Marc & Emma

Some more amazing summer carp & cat fishing ☀️

This week we welcomed Marc and Emma to the venue for their first visit to us. They’ve both been to France a few times before but they’d been looking forward to this one for a long time! They were super excited to finally make it and couldn’t wait to get started.

What can we say, we came with the hope of catching a few good French carp and cats, and our hopes and expectations were well and truly smashed. 46 fish and some absolute stunners including the King and Queen of the lake. For our first French trip together, it has been truly memorable and as hosts, a genuine pleasure to meet you both, and your passion for what you have and what you do is very clear to see, and I’ve learnt so much from your videos and tuition you gave about hooks, that I will carry on with. There can be no greater compliment than someone rebooking, and obviously that’s what we’ve done. Thank you both so so much for an awesome week.

And what a start they made, Marc came with very humble ambitions of one specimen carp and one specimen catfish. Well he ticked both of those boxes within the first 3 hours, oh and the first fish he was most excited about.. good old Sammy who couldn’t wait to put in an appearance.

Sunday started well with another monster catfish but then things started to go the other way with three carp lost. Luckily it was an easy fix and they were back in the game within a few hours.

Emma doesn’t do rig or rod prep but other than that she participates fully in the fishing. They both slept out every night but didn’t fish at night. Mind you when you read the full extent of the catch report you’ll appreciate why, they simply ran out of energy! Marc loves a classic knotless knotted hair rig and morphed into a rig tying machine to keep the runs coming.

Once they got in the groove it was simply a question of ‘rinse and repeat’. It is easy to say but harder to do. It’s even harder to believe how simple fishing is when you know what to focus on.

Thursday was a rather special day when Marc banked Magnum and then Mr. Angry, I’d say those two carp are probably number one and two in the lake now and to catch them both within a matter of hours, well, that is special!

They also did particularly well with the catfish banking 4 monster moggies and 4 smaller ones with zero losses. Marc really wanted at least one big catfish so to catch 4, well, if that isn’t job done I don’t know what is. What he also couldn’t believe is that he did it all using size 5 barbless chod Twisters. 

It’s a good job Emma was there by Marc’s side throughout the session, they had multiple double takes and each time they hooked into a big catfish they wound in all rods regardless because they knew that if another rod was to go while they had a big catfish on, things might not pan out well… I say good call! Emma landed 4 carp and was super buzzed with every one of them.

The fish were caught on single baits, double baits but they did particularly well on small snowman presentations. To begin with they fished small traps, as the confidence grew they applied a bit of bait. Nothing heavy, just 20 baits per rod but that kept the runs coming. On the rig front, Marc opted for a classic hair rig tied with 35lb soft coated braid to size 5 chod Twisters. Every hook was inspected, then rig tied, used once, re-inspected and either re-used or changed. In total he tied 52 rigs, used 52 hooks and well over 20m of hooklink. Was it worth it? Well I’ll let the numbers answer that question!

Big congratulations guys, that was epic!

The success they had this session was no accident. As I’ve always said, there is no luck in fishing. Marc and Emma worked really hard and reaped the rewards. It was wonderful to meet them and as they have already re-booked for 2028, it will be great to welcome them back!