WILLOW LAKE RECORD CATCH!

The famous ‘Plastic Carrot Crew' of Andrew ‘Jock' Downes, Phil ‘I'm Easy' Lewendon and Richard ‘Method Man' Prince visit JLP's Willow Lake near Reims in France for a suntan and a record catch of nearly 50 carp.

Just two of the carp that Jock and his mates caught on a recent session in France

ABOUT WILLOW LAKE

We booked up Willow Lake about 18 months ago, seduced by the stock figures listing 40s and 50s galore in a smallish lake set in tranquil surroundings. Best of all the lake was only a 3.5 hour drive from Calais, which is delightful compared to our usual 7-8 hour trek down to Limoges. JLP Lakes is owned and run by Jeff and Lisa Powell, founders and former owners of the JRC brand. There are 2 lakes on site, Orchard and Willow, plus a 3rd La Fritterie (does that translate as ‘the chip shop'?), a few kilometres away.

Willow was supposed to be the hardest of the three, with about 100 cagey carp to mid-60lb in 4 acres. Jeff was unequivocally honest in his assessment of our chances when we arrived. "You won't catch much, it's bullet hard on Willow. Please don't be disappointed if you only catch a couple of fish each". We knew it was likely to be tougher than some of the venues we had been to in the past, but despite this motivational talk we were still confident of doing well. Can I just thank Jeff for his refreshing, upfront honesty - too many fishery managers hide the truth or tell blatant lies.

From a personal point of view I was probably feeling more negative than Phil and Richard, because in February this year I experienced my first ever French blank! I joined Kevin Maddocks' Winter Syndicate at the fantastic Mar-Pêche but was unable to fish the lake till mid-February. The week I chose to fish, the weather was horrendous, with night temperatures falling to -8°C and daytime temperatures peaking at 18°C! The lake froze at night and defrosted during the daytime. When I arrived Kevin himself was just completing a 2-week blank! To say I was defeated before I even started was not far short of the truth. The final straw came when The Mayor's Cat, who didn't leave me alone all week, vomited up an entire half-digested rabbit right next to my bivvy door! I had watched the cat stalk and catch the rabbit a couple of hours earlier, marvelling at it's hunter's skill, but horrified at the way it ripped the rabbit to shreds to eat it - a bit like comparing the manners of a well-trained house cat to the table manners of a lion

A View from Jock's Swim on Mar Peche

So it was against this backdrop that I started the Willow Lake session, but I needn't have worried because we caught fish from the start. It being my first choice of swim this year, I opted for the little point swim near the fridge, toilet and barbecue. This swim is not always open, but the other swim at this end of the lake was under water due to the very high rainfall recently. I had a bit of shade from some birch trees and could keep an eye on the little bay behind the swim should any fish creep in later in the week. I was also closer to the out-of-bounds far bank where fish would probably turn up at some point, and I could see right down the entire length of the lake. Phil fished right at the opposite end while Richard fished one swim up from Phil.

SUNNY AND DUSTY

The weather was absolutely brilliant for sunbathing, but we initially thought it was crap for fishing. Daytime temperatures were hitting about 29°C with a strong wind blowing down the lake from behind my bivvy. This presented the only real problem of the week. A large cement works next to the lake (we didn't know about this) was serviced by a very dusty gravel road that ran right along one side of the complex. From dawn to dusk this road was busy with 50 tonne trucks going back and forward to the factory and despite the hedge, a massive dust cloud swept across the lake on the strong wind every time a vehicle passed by. By the end of the week my bivvy and just about everything else was covered in dust. It was a lesson well learned - if this sort of thing bothers you make sure you ask the right questions before you book up your chosen lake.

Richard caught a couple of fish on the Method on the first day and night, about 26lb each, and on the Sunday morning at dawn, I had a screaming take followed by a hard fight from a 29lb 12oz Common Carp.

Jock with his first fish of the trip a 29lb 12oz Common Carp

The fish was hooked in about 8ft of water straight out from the point at about 50yds range. Hookbait was a single Brazil nut fished over about 2kg wet weight of Hinders Famous Nutz Sludge Groundbait. I was dropping the bait from a bait boat with an echo sounder, partly to minimise disturbance from casting and spodding, but also because the lake bed was very variable in depth and contours and I wanted to be spot on at my chosen depths. It was nice to be using nuts again for the first time in years. They are very effective when fished over groundbait, and I was dropping a few nuts into the groundbait to get the fish searching them out. Half a dozen nuts per rod is all that is needed to do well on most lakes - large quantities will not always lead to better catches.

Later that morning I hooked and lost a couple of fish from beside one of the aerators on the out-of-bounds bank. This spot produced 4 runs early in the week but for some reason I never worked out they all resulted in dropped fish, so I stopped fishing there. Richard meanwhile was banging away with the Method, using scalded pellet groundbait, and was stacking up a fair number of good fish.

MONDAY MORNING

By Monday morning, we had already caught more fish than the previous anglers had caught in the whole week, and Jeff acknowledged we ‘might do better than most'! Dawn on Monday had seen a fabulous 51lb 6oz leather grace my net, along with a 31lb 12oz fish from the same spot a few hours later. Richard had a 46lb mirror while Phil finally opened his account with a couple of good twenties. In fact as the week wore on Phil started to catch more and more, just as Richard and I seemed to catch less and less! Phil is very good at working out how to catch fish in any given situation and often fishes better as the week goes on, while Richard and I are more instinctive and spontaneous and blow out after a couple of days!

A pure leather in most people's eyes, this 51lb 6oz beauty did in fact have a couple of tiny scales on the wrist.

At 3.15am on Tuesday morning, a twitchy take resulted in a powerful fish which ran hard for a couple of minutes then gave up. Pumping it close I got a glimpse of a colossal 4 ft long fish with pristine scales and a stupid, pouty mouth it was one of the grassies. It wallowed on the top and just as I heaved it over the net cord it exploded out of the water and leapt 3 ft into the air. Line buzzed off the clutch for a couple of yards then it gave up again and I pulled it over the net again - and again it leapt like a salmon for freedom. This time I was ready for it and I lifted the net quickly so it hit the side mesh and fell back into the net. It went mad on the unhooking mat so I quickly weighed it at a massive 42lb and fired off a couple of shots of it on the mat. It was pretty exciting catching that grassie, one of the most impressive fish I've ever caught to be sure, but it's all too much flapping and wriggling for my liking!

This impressive 42lb grass carp left me shaking and giggling like a girl!

AN APPEAL FOR BAIT VARIETY

Just a couple of words here on pellets, groundbait, nuts and other particles.......... a lot of complete rubbish is written and spoken about nuts and particles used as carp bait, usually by people who own a boilie manufacturing company and have a strong financial interest in persuading you to use boilies rather than anything else. It makes complete sense to me that we should ensure carp get a varied diet. Too much of one thing is certainly as bad for the carp as it is for humans. Carp that eat nothing but boilies and pellets, for example in the scenario of a well stocked commercial water, are almost certainly going to be under-nourished by eating such a restricted diet. In just the same way carp eating nothing but nuts or seeds would be similarly under-nourished. It seems likely to me that fishery managers and owners are creating a disaster waiting to happen by feeding their carp a diet restricted to boilies and pellets. Almost as bad is the cynical banning of certain baits and the insistence that anglers buy their bait only from the fishery. This is just an excuse to make a bit more profit at the expense of the angler, but it also restricts the angler's choices and the chance of catching well in any given situation. Carp that always get caught on a particular bait will pretty soon learn to avoid the hookbait, while carp that see a varied bait diet are likely to be less suspicious of a particular bait because there is less chance they have been recently caught on it.

In fact the problem today is worse than ever because so many boilie and pellet recipes are gravitating towards a smaller and smaller range of ingredients - fish meal, crustacean extracts, a small range of bird foods, soya flours and a couple of other cereal meals and maybe low quantities of medium quality milk products. Probably 98% of boilie and pellet recipes are now composed entirely of the same 10-12 bulk ingredients, and as a consequence I believe our carp are not receiving a balanced diet. For the sake of creating a marketing advantage rather than an effective new bait, more and more boilie companies create a new bait each season, utilising nothing but a new smell. Less and less often new baits include radical new base ingredients. Rather than banning or restricting the use of any particular bait or type of bait, particularly on the basis of unproven science, we should celebrate the wide variety of baits that are still available by ensuring we provide the carp with a varied diet of boilies, pellets, nuts, seeds, beans and all the other baits and ingredients available such as maggots, worms and meat baits.

Anyway, back to the fishing at Willow Lake........

A FEW MORE BIGGIES

On the Wednesday morning at 3am I hooked and landed a fantastic 36lb 12oz Common Carp on a single roasted Sainsbury's peanut. It fought like stink, one of the hardest fighting carp I've ever hooked and took about 30 minutes to subdue. By the time I got it back in the water and got the rod sorted out, it was nearly 4am. I had no sooner zipped up the mosquito mesh and got back in bed than one of the other rods screamed off! It was the rod I had flicked round the corner a little into the mouth of the bay, where I had been baiting up since my arrival. The fish fought hard and long, at one point taking me right round the corner into the bay and down towards the bay dugout swim. With the rod held high over the marginal bushes and trees of the little point it was all I could do to stay in contact with the fish. After a few minutes it came right round the point and across the other two lines into the shallow little corner at the bottom of the point!

This superb 36lb 12oz common fought every inch of the way to the net and left me exhausted

Minutes after the 36lb 12oz common this thrilling 41lb 10oz mirror took a Brazil nut in the mouth of the bay

SHORT LIVED HOTSPOTS

We were all experiencing trouble with short lived hotspots. It seemed that you could catch 1-2 fish from a particular spot before the fish became suspicious and moved on elsewhere. In addition the hot, sunny weather was driving the fish under cover of the far bank during much of the daytime. If you were quiet and watchful, you could observe some pretty huge carp milling about and enjoying the shade of the bankside poplars and willows on the out-of-bounds bank. In amongst the mirrors and commons we spotted a couple of huge grass carp and two bizarre orange koi/goldfish type things. These incredible fish were quite useful for getting your eyes attuned to the depth the ordinary carp were patrolling, and they became affectionately known as the Carrots. These tremendous fish were literally under your feet a lot of the time, and it was pretty obvious we should be fishing as close in as possible during the day. This sort of eyeball-to-eyeball fishing, where you can see the fish clearly, plan how to catch them and sometimes see them actually feeding on your bait, is the most exciting form of carp angling for me, akin to stalking but without the discomfort!

MARGIN FISHING

I was already fishing a couple of rods about 4 ft from the trees and didn't want to go much closer because of the chod, twigs, dead leaves and other assorted rubbish under the banks. Phil had caught a couple of 30lb'ers by ramming his bait boat nose first into the bank to get really close, and he didn't think I was fishing tight enough. The water this close was still 3ft-4ft deep, plenty deep enough for even very large carp, so I fiddled about with a couple of rigs and set up to fish right next to the bank.

One rod was fished with a Brazil nut hookbait on a Size 4 ESP D7 Raptor (a fantastic hook) and a single handful of Nutz Sludge, while the other was set up with a single roasted peanut (Sainsbury's) on a Size 7 Fox SSBP (another fantastic hook), drilled out for a tiny 6mm cork ball and superglued together. Roasted peanuts make a fantastic carp bait, producing lots of milky oil if you leave them in water. Boil for 1 hour then tip them into a bucket when cool and leave overnight. Pour the oily juice and a handful of peanuts into Nutz Sludge Groundbait for a fantastic spod or boat mix. Add a bit more water to the peanuts and they will produce more oil, but use them all within about 36 hours of boiling or they will start to go rancid.

Taking a bucket of Nutz Sludge and a marker rod I walked round to a couple of far bank hotspots. The marker float came off and an Angling Intelligence casting rake went on instead. It's quite a heavy rake so it needs some fairly heavy gear. I had a 5 metre 45lb Quicksilver leader tied to 25lb braid on an ESP Spod rod (a fantastic all round spod rod), but I was only dropping it a few feet from the bank. Still, the rake was moving large amounts of junk, particularly dead leaves and twigs. Under this stuff the bottom was quite firm, so I was happy to drop in a couple of handfuls of Sludge on each cleared spot and then steer the bait boat over from the point swim. One rod was positioned 6" from the bank (yes 6 inches!), the other about 18". The 3rd rod was left on the 8ft deep spot, but it seemed this spot had died a death.

The margin fishing tactics worked a treat. Later in the afternoon on the Wednesday, a tentative drop-back on the peanut rod resulted in a superb 46lb 12oz mirror that fought all the way to the bank. Initially Richard and I thought it was as big as the 51lb 6oz I had caught on the Monday, but the scales told a different story. A short while after I had returned the fish, Jeff walked into the swim for a chat, and just then one of the other rods twitched and dropped back. The fish had taken a Hinders pop-up fished right under the far bank on a hinged stiff rig. I instantly knew it was another big carp by the immense power and weight the fish showed as it ploughed off up the lake. It turned and started kiting hard to my left, and then with a sickening ‘ping' the hook fell out.

This good looking 46lb 12oz mirror was a joy to play and land, but I was deeply disappointed to hook and lose another fish shortly after which felt equally as big.

POP-UPS RULE!

Thursday dawned a little less hot than earlier in the week, but it still reached 25°C-26°C. Every day of the trip so far I had caught fish at about 3am, but today for some reason it was a little later when the rods started to rattle off. In quick succession I hooked and lost 2 fish on Hinders pop-ups, which drove me crackers, and then I got 2 takes in a new spot and failed to connect with either one! Bad angling I think, but I wasn't doing anything differently from earlier in the week. Richard in the meanwhile was going mad and at one point had 3 fish on at the same time! By this time we had caught nearly 40 fish and were heading for a possible record number of fish for Willow Lake. Richard also caught another of the huge grassies, but not the same fish I had landed earlier in the week, while Phil had started to stack up an impressive number of 30lb'ers.

The weather forecast for the rest of the week was a little more promising, with lower temperatures and thundery rain forecast for Friday and Saturday so we were keen to fish hard for the rest of the trip. My swim appeared to be jinxed now, because on Friday morning I hooked and lost another fish, this time on a Brazil nut. Richard caught a couple and Phil caught a couple but I was struggling. Then at about 1pm, with the weather a little cooler and with rain finally appearing, a screaming run resulted in a cracking mirror of 38lb 12oz, a good looking fish with mouth like a bucket! It was great to land a fish after losing several and fresh-airing a couple of takes.

Although it was actually not very important to us, we were now in the position of needing to catch just 4-5 more fish to beat the record number of carp caught in a week at Willow Lake, but we only had about 18 hours left to do it in. We went off to our respective swims to start the long pack-down but also to ensure everything was spot on for the last evening and night. At about midnight I got a belter on one of the margin rods, and was pleased to land a 31lb mirror on a Hinders Nutz Pop-Up fished tight to the far bank over a kilo of Nutz Sludge. But the real surprise turned up at dawn on Saturday, when a twitchy, stop-start run resulted in a hard fighting fish that ploughed up and down the margins for 15 minutes shaking it's head like a good un'. Not at all sure what I had hooked, I gingerly encouraged the fish to the surface, into the light from the headtorch and approaching dawn. To my utter shock, a colossal goldfish bobbed up to the top, totally bright orange and looking fin perfect. I could do nothing but burst out laughing.

The fish weighed 22lb 4oz, and I wrapped it up safely in the weigh sling and trotted round to show Richard and Phil. They were as astonished as I was, and the news now was that we had equalled the lake record for the number of carp caught in a week at Willow Lake. 2 hours later Phil caught yet another 30+ lump and we had done it!

This is not the first time that we had caught an exceptional number of carp, or an exceptional number of big carp, during one of our French trips. At Domaine de Boux we caught about 230 carp in 2 one week trips; in one trip to Millstone Pool we caught 24 carp over 40lb, plus 50-odd 20s and 30s, and in another we caught 6 50 pounders plus loads of back-up 20s, 30s and 40s.I make this point not because I want to impress the reader, but because I want to let the reader know that hardly any of these fish were caught on boilies or pellets. They were principally caught on particles, groundbait and The Method, using plastic hookbaits, pop-up boilies and nuts as hookbaits. Boilies and pellets did play their part, particularly as part of a groundbait mix and the pellets principally as the base for an effective Method mix.

In most cases we could tell how many fish get caught at French commercial venues, because most fisheries have a detailed catch return book. We could see how many fish boilies and pellets were catching and we decided that was not good enough, so we looked for alternatives. The fish eat boilies and pellets, but they sure as hell don't get caught on them very often compared to our general level of success on The Method, groundbait and particles.

Another good point to make here is that bait boats seem to make a big difference in catch rates, and I think this is principally because there is a huge reduction in water disturbance from spodding or catapulting. Sure, the carp will eventually suss out the threat from bait boats, but at the moment they seem to bring a significant advantage.

I hope you have enjoyed reading about my latest trip to France and have picked up some ideas for your own French fishing. Please don't hesitate to call or email if you want help on fishing in France or the UK as there is always someone at Hinders to give solid reliable advice.

Cheers
Andrew ‘Jock' Downes

This bucket-mouthed 38lb 12oz mirror broke a run of 3 lost fish and 2 missed takes, so I was doubly pleased to get it into the net

The views and content in this article are those of the author and therefore do not necessarily represent Hinders Fishing Superstore.