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Lake Bolsena 3rd - 9th September 2012

Made it back from my spring session over in France which had begun back in early May. The plan was to start down towards the south of the country and hopefully get the early good weather before heading back up North in June. It was an overnight ferry just so that I was travelling around Paris at around 3-4 in the morning, which is always a good tip if you have to go around the capital. Once past the capital I could then relax have an hours kip and then a coffee as I watched the sun rise, it was great feeling. Then it was back on the autoroute for the remainder of the journey, I was trying to decide which lake or river to start on and was weighing up the best bet. In the end I decided to drop in on monkey lake as it was the first one I was to come to, the lake looked perfect through the trees. When I got down to the slipway I discovered the lake empty which was even better, the lake was high, but look fantastic, the sun was shining and it seemed rude not to spend the next week there.

My favourite spot was free about a mile down the lake so everything was shipped into the boat and off I went. Having set the viper up the next task was to sort the bait out, I spread about 5kg of monster pursuit and scopex squid out along the margins from 1 metre to 10 metres along a 100 metre strip. The lake drops very sharply down to 40 metres and so it only needs a little catch to get into the 10 metre water. The question was how active would the crayfish be, still not to orry as I was armed with a batch of the mutants to try. The crayfish in the lake are absolute beasts and will eat even the hardest of boilies and they don’t even mind tiger nuts easily cutting them in half with their claws.

As it happens the crayfish were well on form, which would also hopefully mean the big carp would be about. This meant the need to use the mutants and so I teamed up a large mutant with a 25mm monster pursuit bottom bait creating a snow man set up. The mutants come in various sizes and colors giving you all kinds of options but my favourite and the ones I have done best on are the fluro orange and yellow. I fished 3 rods with this combination and the other rod with tiger nuts. It was however the boilie rod which produced the first action and a nice fish in the middle of the night, I was expecting more action and so put the fish straight back. However the weather turned wet,cold and stormy and the fishing became very difficult, however the crayfish were still very active and so I was confident the carp would still be about. The water level was still coming up and large logs and rubbish were floating about all over the lake making it difficult as lines were constantly getting snagged. So much so that one night I had to turn the buzzer off on one rod as the line was trapped around a large log and I couldn’t free it. First light and I was awoken by the clutch on that rod screaming, by now I could see the problem and managed to free the line before jumping in the boat to do battle. The fish had gone deep and it was a real battle to pull it up through the depths but I was more than happy to get the net under a big mirror with the yellow fluro mutant hanging from its mouth. I stayed another few days but this was the last of the action, so decided to move on but would be back later in the month when things had settled down.