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Lake Bolsena 2nd - 8th September 2012

Made it onto the river at last, a week late but it is looking in fine condition. It looked like I might catch one on the last night on the lake as the fishing started to crash over the baited areas for the first time in a week but it was not to be.

I backed up early morning, did not want to leave it too late as once the sun was up it would be a roaster again. The petrol outboard nearly got me all the way back to the car before conking out 50 metres from the slip, bloody thing, and I had to paddle the rest of the way very uncool with a couple of people looking on!

The car was loaded in double quick time and I was off to the supermarket for some much needed food and beer, not had any for over a week, beer that is not food. The bar next door was shut, not sure why might be a holiday, they have nearly one a week in May and you lose track of them, so no Wi-Fi, not to worry the emails would have to wait.

Onto the river and my chosen spot was free, so sat having a beer or two and just at and marvelled at the beauty of the lot valley it is a truly awesome place. After a spot of lunch I slowly started to sort the gear out, made new rigs up as I could come off the mutants, there wasn’t a crayfish problem here and so fish with my more standard snowman baits in 20mm. That done I had a little look around in the boat, I had a rough idea of where I wanted the baits but just wanted to double check. There wasn’t many fish in the snag trees but what I did see was impressive, out of 10 odd fish I saw some 8 of them must have been over 50, it was beautiful sight and some lovely different types of mirrors, not just the long, black beasts. Will take the camera next time to see if I can get some shots.

The only down side to this piece of the river is that night fishing is banned so you have to be a bit careful as I get checked every other trip, so I just had two rods out for the night. About an hour before dark though saw a lot of fish crash to my left which I don’t normally see, so made a mental note of that and will investigate in the morning. It was a bright almost fullish moon, the fish could be heard crashing for about an hour into dark and then it went quiet. No action on the rods although they were pretty much wiped out by a huge floating raft of debris about an acre in size. Not much happening at dawn, was expecting more, redone the rods and got a rod down to where they were crashing the night before although because of some fallen trees the shallowest I can get the rod is 20ft which might be a little deep. Across the far margin screamed out for a tiger nut wafter it is almost a shear drop to the river bed but with the use of the prodder you can find some small ledges to drop the hook bait onto. I got some cooked up, and had already soaked them the night before as I had been thinking they would be worth a try having not used them before on this stretch. No pike anglers about today which is great, think the really hot weather has put the off, shame. After the hectic day, yesterday it’s just nice to sit and relax and watch the river go past and waiting for the first river carp of the year, hopefully not too long a wait.

Quiet night not only on the buzzer front but also not many carp crashing about compared with what I would normally expect here. Re do three of the rods after the expected early morning feeding spell, don’t want to disturb the areas too much as the carp don’t see too much pressure and can be a bit spooky. With the sun well and truly up and it looking like another glorious day, thought I would take the camera out in the boat and try to get some shots of the carp basking in the snags but they all seemed a bit camera shy and there was very little about. On the way back to the bivvy a big old snake appeared from the depths and appeared to want to attack the boat. Great, that’s all I need a snake wanting to share my boat so full throttle to avoid it, it went under the boat and I had visions of it being diced up in the prop but it managed to avoid that. Half way through the river session let’s hope the second half is better.

Today’s on the bank tackle test – Nash Prodding stick

This really has been a great piece of kit, ive have tried making something like this for years from using lengths of conduit to lengths of roach poles but they never quite done the job. So when i saw this baby being produced i was excited it was just what i needed and worked as i wanted it to. My old ones were okay in shallower water but when you start to get down to 20ft plus the water pressure makes it difficult. When im fishing the big waters as im doing now my initial feature finder is of course the echo sounder and when suitable spots are found they are marked. Now with the Prodding stick i can fine tune the area and find exactly where i want my hookbait to be. When i was on the Orient i really like to find where the weed stops and get a bait exactly on this line, i can now do this very precisely. Another benefit which i found on the Orient with its stumps was that if i taped a hook on the end i can slide the prodding stick down the line if it is snagged and in most cases free the line. On the river Lot much of the margins are steep and rocky and the best places to put baits is on the ledges and i can really pinpoint these with my new piece of kit.

As you can see lots of advantages to using the Prodding Stick and i really can’t fault it at all and is as such a bonus and a real eye opener as to what you are fishing over and around.