World Carp Classic - Offical Global Website
Lake Bolsena 3rd - 9th September 2012
| Andy C's Spring Session Pt 2 |
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 Having packed up on Monkey I now had a few options, one of which was the River Lot but with the amount of rain we had had over the last few days I was sure this would be running hard now over the next week and so didn’t fancy it just yet.
I therefore decided to go and look at a big lake that I hadn’t fished before called Paraloup, it’s a proper lake certainly 2-3000 acres.
I had heard a few rumours of it doing a few good fish and some mates had fished it back in the Autumn with some success. I arrived there on the Friday morning with the wind and rain piling down the lake, its an interesting shaped lake with lots of arms and therefore possibilities. I chose and area that would hopefully give me plenty of options and an intercepting spot into another part of the lake. The only problem I could see was that the lake was at altitude and still being early (it was mid May) could still be too cold up here.
This was bourne out in the evening when the skies cleared and temperatures dropped below zero through the night, I was glad I chucked my second skin clothing in at the last moment as I awoke to a heavy frost. With any new water it’s a question of covering as many options as possible whilst you learn and figure out the lake and so I tried baits in various depths from the margins down to 15m and a selection of baits. The trouble was that despite the banks looking pretty interesting the echo sounder showed the bottom to be very flat with no features which was strange, no snags, bars or plateaus. This didn’t give me much confidence nor did the fact that the surface temperature of the lake was a mere 12 degrees, when I had left Monkey which was also at altitude but not quite as much and deeper it was 19 degrees. It looked like the lake would be better fished at the back end of the year when water temperatures had risen and had levelled out throughout the layers.
Now that I was here I would learn as much as I could about the lake as I could but despite watching the water for days and looking out at around 500 acres I didn’t see a single carp. It was a useful experience but I generally felt that I could have stayed there for a month and still not caught anything, that’s big lakes for you. Time to move on again. |
