Fishing report from: Ashley, Sarah, Chris & Jonathan

A good week’s fishing with carp to 41 lbs with plenty of 30s

This week we welcomed Ashley and his partner Sarah along with friends Chris and Jonathan for their first fishing trip to France. After waiting for two years, to say they were looking forward to the experience would be a massive understatement!

I was back on Sunday for the tuition session. The guys are all experienced anglers but the waters they fish are very different to our lake and the approach is very different. This is no place for chods, helicopters or lead clips. After a detailed exploration of the lake bed, the guys understood what they were up against and I laid out a plan that would work for them. It was going to be a very big shift from what they knew with rigs and lead setups they hadn’t used before. 

By Tuesday morning, Chris was off the mark with a funny old carp named Charlie Brown. Ashley was a little bit injured which was limiting the options available to him when it came to positioning rigs. After a few tweaks I was confident they were in the game and I helped them refine their options for dropping rigs accurately.

While I was helping Ashley & Sarah, Jonathan got off the mark with a nice 34 lbs common. Later in the week he banked another cracker known as The Football.

It doesn’t matter how many, what really matters is what they mean to you.

Jonathan was delighted with the two mid thirties he caught. He knew there was a risk of blanking here but despite that risk, he took my advice on board, applied it and was successful. Good work! 👏

Chris was very happy to be off the mark but he believed he had been done, so there were a few doubts in his mind about rigs, baiting strategy and spots. The carp gremlins (as I call them) are nasty little creatures and they need to be kept in line! Sometimes it’s just enough to talk these things through to settle the mind.

24hrs later, and the whole picture had changed dramatically. There had been 4 more carp on the bank and it was great to know that everyone was off the mark and between them they’d had six now.

With the train firmly on the tracks, on Thursday, Sarah stole the show with a magnificent common, weighing in at 41 lbs. Named Nicky, she’s no mug but she tripped up on a rig positioned along the snake bank. The carp had been showing there so it was only natural to drop a rig on this activity. Nicky is a powerful carp and Sarah did seriously well to control her for the photos. Brilliant work!

In recent weeks I’ve seen more and more carp being caught from rigs dropped or cast to showing fish.

Finding and targeting specific spots is all good fun but at the end of the day, just because a spot feels good doesn’t mean it’s going to do a bite.

Ashley mentioned that if he’d not taken the tuition he’d have fished the North facing island margin all week and probably have blanked with this approach. Even with all my experience it’s easy to get sucked into traps like this. At the end of the day you need to pay attention to what the fish are doing each day. What happened the week before is immaterial. At most times of year (except deep winter) they will tell you where to fish. 

Being the party leader and head chef is not a small job and Ahsley did a great job on both fronts, making sure everyone was looked after.

Sometimes this meant his own personal fishing took 2nd place but he was confident in his skills and the approach and his persistence paid off when he was rewarded with a cracking upper thirty on the last morning before they had to start the hateful job of packing down. The carp was named Helix and put a massive smile on his face. Bloody good work mate, you earned that!

Over in the big double, Chris was the first off the mark and managed to catch at least one carp every 24 hrs thereafter which is what every angler can aim for here. The really big girls avoided him but he had a string of mid thirties. In the end he finished “top rod” with six carp in total.

I know that Chris really wanted one more to finish and I’m sure that next time he’ll be able to get going quicker and build a bigger score. The carp have seen quite a bit of pressure in the last few weeks and a lot of them have been caught. It’s not possible for the lake to continue to fish at the incredible level it has been. It just goes to show that even with good oxygen levels, every bite is hard won.

Bait & rigs

All carp were caught on the Scopex Squid over small traps of flakes, pellets and particles. Baiting up was done by hand, boat and with a spomb.

During the tuition I showed the guys how to tie the blowback multi rig because it’s by far the most popular rig with guests and the anglers that take the tuition. It’s the rig that they started with and they caught a few on it but later in the week, they switched over to my deadly D-Rig because it was closer to the chod rigs they are familiar with. 

If you’ve never fished with supple rigs it’s difficult to automatically become super confident in a supple braided rig overnight.

I have a range of rigs that work great here and that I’m confident in and I certainly prefer some rigs for certain waters over others. What works for me isn’t necessarily going to work for you. The blowback multi is popular because it’s easy to tie and easy to use. I’m also a big fan of the deadly D-rig because it’s very reliable and works on a wide range of waters. It’s also better suited to casting. 

We’ll be back!

The guys admitted that they were surprised by how hard the lake is. On paper it’s a small, well stocked lake and I mean how hard can it be, right? The reality is that this water is going to test you in ways you can’t imagine. The easy choice would have been for them to go to a large, commercial, heavily stocked venue and smash out some big French chunks. The trouble is that it gives a false impression of your skills (as one of their friends found out) and you won’t learn very much. It can literally ruin fishing for you as the crash back to earth can be brutal.

Thanks guys for trusting my plan, big congratulations and so glad you enjoyed the challenge which is the most important thing.