Fishing report from: Sean & Mark

A successful week with multiple carp to 49 lbs

This week we welcomed Sean and Mark to the venue for their first visit. Sean is a regular visitor to France and has fished multiple different venues but for Mark this would be his first foreign trip. He’s also a self confessed novice to the sport and hasn’t been carp fishing very long. 

Despite Sean’s experience they booked me for a day’s tuition and we had a great time together on Sunday going through everything they needed to know. They were both quite surprised at how different my approach was to theirs but they took it all on board and set the plan into motion.

Matt’s knowledge is off the chart. He shares this with patience and the attention to detail is so precise I now fish with much more confidence in what I’m doing. Can’t wait to return and carry out the next lesson extending my fishing experience. Thank you both for a faultless stay. Mark.

Sean Caught two on the Saturday which boded well after a difficult week last week. By Wednesday, Sean had caught Sammy 3 times (he’s having a bit of a week!) and had three more nice carp including The Sub at 49 lbs! Mark was yet to get going so we spent a bit more time together and went in search of the carp in the boat.

By Friday Sean had racked up 4 more carp all around the 30lb mark but it still hasn’t happened for Mark. This venue can be very spotty and when it’s tricky the number of productive spots drops dramatically. The oxygen levels were good all week but the carp are still recovering from spawning and bites are few and far between. These are challenging conditions for a veteran French regular but on your first trip, with little previous experience to draw on, it’s really tough.

Luckily Sean’s previous experience stood him in good stead and he was able to have a really good session. Any angler that gets into double figures of specimen fish caught has done very well here. He never caught the big catfish he wanted but he did smash his previous carp PB of 31lbs clean out of the water so it was very much a case of job done. Sean’s already trying to work out how to break it to his wife that he’s planning a return trip!

As the week drew to a close, time was running out for Mark. Sean badly wanted Mark to catch and it was clear that his head was starting to wobble just a bit which is totally understandable. Sean decided that a trip out was exactly what they needed. Sometimes the best thing you can do to solve a problem is to step away from it. Even if it’s just for a couple of hours. 

When they got back, Sean helped to steer Mark onto his corner hotspots that had done the most bites and within a couple of hours we got the message that we’d been waiting for. Mark had only gone and caught the old warrior that is Hyphen at a whopping 45 lbs! 

It’s tough to keep the faith when the going gets tough, so fair play mate for sticking to the program 👊

Bait & Rigs

The guys went all out on the Scopex Squid foods packs and went through a fair bit of bait between them. In his quest for a big catfish Sean also used 25 kg of catfish pellets (sammy loves them too 🤣). All of the carp were caught on single 20mm bottom baits presented on my ever faithful blowback multi rig. Initially Sean was using a bait boat but that died halfway through so he had to row all his rigs out. As Mark started off in the channel I helped him become familiar with Sean’s bushwhacker baiting pole. It’s a fantastic method but distance limited so Mark also had to master rowing and dropping rigs from a boat which is a really hard thing to do.

Congrats guys, it was a pleasure to welcome you and spend time on the bank with you.