World Carp Classic - Official Global Website
Lake Bolsena 2nd - 8th September 2012

The extreme conditions seemed to have an effect on the carp as well and despite a 29 mirror at the start of the afternoon feeding session, which gave me hope of a repeat performance of the previous day, nothing else occurred apart from a tench at dusk.

The wind kept up most of the night but by dawn it had died right down and the sun was out, happy days. I got up early and redid all the rods, topping the spots up with about 5kg of bait, because I was hopeful that the carp would be on the munch given the conditions.

An hour before midday and a mutant was away. It felt like a good fish and so, with the wind right down, I went out in the boat just for a change, but once over the fish it gave up pretty easily which was unusual. What was even more unusual, for here, was that it was a really a lovely scaley fish, not as big as I thought but another mid twenty and I wasn’t complaining.I was expecting it to kick on from there for the afternoon but it didn’t. I had a funny take at about 5 when the fish swam straight towards me and then spat the hook out.

I felt I needed to ring the changes for the second week, I was half way through and although the mutants had done well I felt I needed to mix things up if I was to keep the catch rate up. So, the plan for the following day was to keep one on the double mutant, the other rod out front would be my more normal 20mm snowman set up with the monster squid and then a little tiger stack presented on the margin rod.

I would also increase the amount of bait I put out from 5kg to 10kg to hopefully get them going.

Come the morning, after another very quiet night - the lake goes completely dead at night nowadays and it now seems to be purely a day action water - the plan was put into place. The wind was nonexistent and when it did blow it was from all points of the compass, not a great sign, and guess what, not a single bleep on the sirens all day, the worst day yet for not having a single take or fish. Still, I would persevere with the plan.

As I'm writing this early the next morning, there’s a perfect wind on the lake so I’m much more confident the change in rigs and set ups will work, if not then it will have to be plan c, but what plan c is I haven't a clue as yet! The fishing over the next few days was slow to say the least and the only fish I caught were roach on my little decathlon set up, still, it was good fun. I was

also joined for a few days fishing by Mark Patton who lives in the area and if anyone has been out to fish Lac Cavagnac over the last two years would probably have seen him there as he was the guy who cooked everyone’s food. So, although the fishing was slow I was certainly going to eat well over the coming days as he served up some great meals.

Now that the lake has closed he is doing a bit of guiding so if you fancy fishing in that beautiful region of France, fishing for some difficult but hard fighting carp and getting well looked after then get in touch with him. Mark managed a nice 29lb mirror early one morning but other than that the lake was dead, perhaps the carp had gone off spawning somewhere, it certainly felt like

that.

The session now ended and I was off back to England for a few days before flying back down to Spain for the World CatfishClassic. Then, after a short break, a really exciting trip to the Czech Republic and Slovakia to plan for - two places I have never been to before.