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Lake Bolsena 3rd - 9th September 2012

The Match - Monday morning arrived and we drove off to our launch point. We were soon being boated across to our swim for the 3pm start of the match on the Monday. One of the prematch tactics Tom and I had discussed was to take the microcat baitboat with remote echo sounder.

We knew that all the boat activity on the first day would see Madine and its carpy inhabitants suffer a huge disruption to their normal tranquil day, and so we were able (with the help of a sublime sunny day in the 30s) to echo the whole area in front of us with no disturbance. We had agreed boundaries with our French neighbours to the left and had no one to our immediate right. The right hand side of the swim was the margin of a bay running away from us and round to a corner before turning northwards to the main bank facing the dam wall where the majority of Pescalis section was pegged. To the left of us was just one peg, no 13 (last one of pescalis) before it too rounded away northwards and upward behind us to the Hutchy section (this was the section in which Tom and I fished last year and blanked, along with almost the entire section). We had approx 250 yards of water between our extreme left hand rod and our extreme right hand rod. (I always fish the left side and Tom the right side- basically I dress on the left and Tom dresses on the right, if you know what I mean).

The echo had told us we had depths from our right of 3 ½ - 4ft in the bay margins dropping to 7-8 ft with weed beds (we could see the beds of weed in the sun) dotted in front of Tom from 150- 200 yds out and then gradually dropping to 10-12 ft as we moved in front of my side with little or no weed to the deepest areas of 14ft on my furthest left had rod at 200 yds range. It took us into the early evening to plot the depths of the swim and the features it held. Tom’s margins had tree stumps all the way along and would entail the use of floating braid and poly ball suspension of rigs to keep the line above the snags. We had again already decided beforehand the method on the first night would be to drop all four rigs with E-S-P PVA socks using the microcat and would fish the extreme left and right rods with snowman boilie set ups and just drop a ½ kilo of freebies on the two outer rods. The two inside rods we would use popped up tigers and would heavily bait with particles (hemp and tigers) using the hoppers of the microcat to drop off 4-5 kilo on each rod. The idea was that if we were going to start getting takes on baited areas we didn’t want to be catching close to our neighbours (on the left ) and any heavy baiting was best on the inside rods and away from their lines. We utilised the entire radius of our swim and had 4 lines spaced out in the 250yrs of area afforded to us. The rigs and tactics we decided were driven by the spots we fished. On Toms rods we used the new Solar Weedy leaders and rigs, which Tom and Kevin have developed with solar tackle and  of which Tom and I (in part) have been field testing over the last two and a half  years. These rigs were perfect for the weed beds in front of Tom. The line is invisible to the carp and blends in with the weed in which the rig is lying next to.

For Tom's right hand rod, close to the cut down tree stumps, we used floating 50lb whiplash attached to a 7ft  Weedy leadcore leader and Weedy rig hook length of 15-18ins in length. We attached an oversized polyball by link (after losing the first take) to the mainline and stopknotted with powergum 10ft from the 12oz breakaway lead.

The other three rods were loaded with 16lb Ultima Powercarp mainline and tied to Leadcore leaders of 6-7ft length, again Tom using the weedy leadcore leader and I the more conventional Fox leadcore leader in the clearer water and clay bottom. My end tackle was 25lb Kryston Quicksilver Gold hooklengths of 18ins tied to Fox SSC size 3 hooks, Fox lead clips and 12oz breakaway leads.

We had settled into our swim and made camp for the week and were now fully prepared and comfortable for what ever events would take place (or so we thought)

At 10 o’clock on the Monday night Tom’s right hand Rod tore into action, using braid and with no stretch, the rod banged over, kicking the delkim into life. A carp had hooked itself on Toms rig and he was in the boat in a flash and was soon out in the distance playing the carp........the look on Toms face on his return told me it wasn’t to be. The carp had shed the hook on one of the numerous tree stumps (It would be the only time we would lose a carp that way). Far from being despondent, this was only good news to us; it meant we had carp in our swim. Once the rod had been repositioned....... this time by dinghy using the newly set up floating polyball rig, we settled for the night and retired to our bivvys, it was then that we started to hear carp crashing out to our left , in front of our neighbours and at range , around the 200 yrd mark at a guess , the weather was still very clement and with no wind or rain and prevalent high pressure we were able to hear the Carp crashing out in what would be  the only night of the week that this would be the case. (I didn’t actually see or hear any carp for the remaining 4 nights- apart from the ones we caught).
We were up at the crack of dawn on the Tuesday, and although we hadn’t had any further action during the night, we were both buoyant and started to discuss the plan for the day. We agreed we would leave the rods as they were until the afternoon, and now that the lake had settled we would take advantage of the reduced activity. We would use the dinghy and echo sounder to look at our spots but use a donking rod (cut down 6ft rod with braid and heavy lead) to vertically drop from the boat and donk (lift up and down quickly and repeatedly) on the bottom over the spots we fancied.  This was to find the hardest spots we could, as much of the lake bed was soft clay. Having plotted the whole area on the Monday we could go out in straightish lines to our marks and once we were satisfied with our spots we would attach atropa tube markers with lights fitted to be able to quickly re-drop the rods at night after any takes.

The weather had now changed with hardly any sun during the day, the temperature had dropped and I think we may even have had rain on the Tuesday. It had still been reasonably easy to go out in the boat and drop the rods off, with the wind only just beginning to blow a little, “carp” conditions were improving. We had heard news that 15 or so fish had been landed from the Lake by Tuesday evening.

At 10.15pm that night we had our second take. It was on Tom’s right hand rod in the margins of the bay to our right about 150yds distance. This time there was no look of disappointment on his face as he returned with the prize lying on the unhooking mat in the boat. We duly called Rob Rees and Chris Rainbow on the phone to get them to traipse across to our swim from their camp area on the Island (about a half mile through woods from us). Oh how refreshed and jovial they were at this early stage of the event and how they laughed at our magnificent 1.55 kg common. Well, at least we were off to a start.

By 6 o’clock on the Wednesday morning we had landed 5 more carp through the night – 18kg, 14.6kg, 19kg, 12kg, and 9.1kg. We had managed about an hour and a half’s sleep, but we were absolutely buzzing and any chance of sleep through the day was soon discounted with the arrival of Ross Honey, TV crews, official cameramen and assortments of shepherds, sheep, dogs, etc.

Part 3 will be published soon