Sam, his uncle Bob and their respective better halves, Katy and Rachel, joined us on Lac Lucie this week, along with Badger and Bonnie, their lovable Frenchies. Sam and Katy had left North Yorkshire earlier in the week and travelled down through France stopping to camp and fish on their route. With a Land Cruiser, ex-military trailer and Tent Box they were definitely well equiplled and nice and chilled out by the time they reached us. Bob and Rachel took the quicker route, flying from Leeds/Bradford on the Friday and stopping in a nice boutique hotel near the airport before we collected them Saturday morning.
By Saturday evening they both had their gear all out and were set up and ready to fish. Katy and the dogs slept down by the lake as well, ready for action and hopefully some photos to be taken. Sam was on the main bank with his 3 rods and Bob up on the side swim with his. They had chosen our bait package each but shared the two flavours between them and had some hard hookers ready for the nuisance crays.
On Sunday morning when we saw them they had both struck lucky, Bob with a 33lb 3oz mirror in the night, a new PB and then Sam with a 32lb 12oz mirror at 9.30am, also a new PB so they were both feeling very happy. The crays had not really been a problem and they were sure they were going to have a great week.
The next day Bob smashed his PB again with a 37lb 8oz mirror and then for a third time with a 43lb 6oz common. During the early hours. Unfortunately he decided not to wake the others for a photo and only managed to get one of the fish in the cradle.
Sam was starting to feel that he was lagging behind, having only had one fish out so decided to think a bit outside of the box and got his 9ft stalking rod out with a 12lb line and found a little grub to put on his hook. Within half an hour he had caught a 27lb common on it and was well pleased. So he started hunting under various logs etc and found another worm with the thought that it couldn’t do any harm. We saw him at around 3pm when he had just landed our token baby, ‘Matty’. We weighed him and he was just over 2lb.
Sam and Bob swapped swims halfway through the week with Bob focusing more on the left hand bank and Sam casting out to the middle and around the aerator. Sam continued his roll and caught another new PB, a 38lb mirror on Tuesday morning and then did some more stalking on Wednesday afternoon with a prawn that Katy had picked up for him and got a 15lb common.
Bob was quite happy sat in the shade with Rachel beside him on the bivvie bed reading her book and was pleased that he had already smashed his PB three times. But Thursday was his day again with a lovely common weighing 16lb.
As the weather had really started to heat up on Thursday with highs of 30 degrees we thought that that might be it for the week but Sam had the final say with no less than 3 fish out on Friday, a 44lb common at 10am, another new PB, a 22lb common at 4pm and a recapture of his 38lb mirror at 7.30pm in the evening.
And with 12 carp out between them over what became a very hot week, the two anglers went home happy. The ladies had had a good week, chilling in the sun and shade, doing plenty of reading and looking after Badger and Bonnie, who were a delight to have around.
The final tally for the week was 1 baby, 2 at 10lb+, 2 at 20lb+, 5 at 30lb+ and 2 at 40lb+. An impressive week by some great anglers and we hope to welcome them back here again one day. Until then à bientôt…
