Two weeks of fishing fun in beautiful surroundings
For the last two weeks, we welcomed Bill and Steve to the venue. Affectionately known as the “catfish brothers”, they have called Beausoleil their fishing holiday home for many years now. As always they were using highly selective big catfish gear rigs and tactics to avoid the carp.
Bill and Steve normally fish the days only but as the temperature were set to hotter and hotter as the weeks progressed, they’d decided to switch to a nighttime only approach to make the most of the cooler hours. What was interesting was that the hotter it got, the later in the night the peak of the activity became. Bill aligned this with the changes in the moon phase but we’re not sure that tells the whole story. With steadily rising lake temperature the timing of the coolest water period temperature would behave in a very similar fashion, getting later and later as the days rolled by.
With the specimen fishing schedule running from 20:00 – 06:00, the mornings were set aside for resting and the afternoons for live bait catching. As usual the larger roach were few and far between but the bream were plentiful which is crazy considering they were all removed in the last netting! As well as fishing with live baits suspended from surface rigs, the guys also fished on the bottom with a wide range of baits.
At the end of the two weeks Bill concluded that there was no winning method or bait, the number of runs that each combination received was always about the same. Getting movement on the bobbins wasn’t hard. The guys regularly received short runs on the bait runner system but by the time they’d wound down and lifted the rod to strike the result was usually the same, no hook-up. Bill attributed these occurrences to smaller catfish or larger catfish not feeding with enough confidence. Bill suggested that a switch to a more carp-orientated approach (smaller hooks and baits) may well have proved more successful but they are not here to catch carp, they only want to catch the very biggest catfish and are happy to reduce the number of fish landed as a result of this choice.
Bill and Steve fish super heavy gear. The max safe casting weight rated on Steve’s rods is 1000g…. and their reels are also top of the line catfish grade with big powerful clutches and big handles. We are talking in terms of the heaviest fixed spool setup that money can buy. In terms of line, the guys used a bright orange pro spec 30lb line from Berkeley that I’m not familiar with. On paper this should make landing anything they hook a formality but unfortunately Steve was bust up by an un-seen obstacle in open water (probably a rock). It was a shame but Steve accepted the result in his normal good humoured, philosophical fashion.
Bill’s snap ups were a little more unusual… As Bill is the “ace” bream angler, you can imagine his surprise when his little float disappeared, the rod hooped down and the hooklink failed… So he re-rigged, went again and then he snapped a size 14 hook… Third time’s the charm as they say and after a sporty battle, he landed a 30lb carp on a 1lb test curve float rod. Bill had to stop using hemp as it’s just too attractive for carp! So what started out as a highly selective catfish only approach turned out to be a species hunt. Bill caught the sturgeon on boilies and one specimen catfish (72lb).
As always it was lovely to see the guys and we wish them all the best with their next angling adventure.
