NEW Video Article Pt 1 – Life In Lockdown; Understanding Lac Solace

Here we go again! I don’t want to dwell on the Covid situation too much, there isn’t much more to say is there? It goes without saying though that it has been the hardest year from a business point of view that Sharon and I have ever experienced, let alone in the 5 years we have lived in France.

As I write this we are entering our 6th day of Lockdown here in France, and yet again we have had to postpone what should have been our last 4 weeks of the season on both lakes, as well as my own personal fishing holiday booked for the end of the month, it is a tough pill for us all to swallow, but there arnt many other options so after a serious sulk for a few days I put my big boy pants back on and decided to get on with it. Enjoy some fishing at my own lakes over the colder months and get some of those niggly little jobs done to ensure when we open in February the lakes are perfect.

In Lockdown 1 I made some short films, “The Lockdown Challenge” which thousands of you watched and enjoyed which we are grateful for. A fair few of you also asked more in-depth questions about tactics, rigs, bait prep etc, so this Lockdown I am going to start a video article series.

Its really simple, it is a written article that feature a few short videos as well as the photos throughout the article to bring it to life and look more closely at certain things like rig tying. Its a fair bit more work to produce but overall I think they will work well.

So now you understand what to expect over the coming months I hope you will drop in every few weeks and have a little catch up with shats going on at the lakes.

My plan for the colder months is to target Lac Du Coron there are still so many special fish in the lake that I would like to catch, the big common, the zip lins, the scattered mirror, the Italian to name just a few. So for the first time I decided to find my own open water spot and try and get a specific area rocking. I found a deep hole infront of the hyde a bit to the right of Lotties and to the left of Rolos. Each day that I am down there working I will keep the pellet and bait going in, fingers crossed in a few weeks that one of those rare ones makes an appearance!

In the meantime though I am lucky enough to be able to fish Lac Solace whilst I try and Implement my plan! It seems strange as I am there all the time, but without just being there, doing nothing but fishing, and watching you lose touch with the fishing, where they are showing and feeding. So this time I just wanted to spend the afternoon with the rods out, wandering the banks and looking for signs so later in the week I could come back, do the night and fish a little less blind. There is a lot of open water at Lac Solace and often when you are on your own you end up chasing them and over working it, well I do anyway. If I could get an idea where to concentrate on for the end of the week it would be an

afternoon well spent. After a good few laps I saw the tell tale signs of a few bubblers out infront of the bench. As I normally do I had abag of bait with me, so thinking it would be a good place to start on Friday I put a whole bag in an area about the size of a two man bivvy. I then carried on my walk and skipped in one of the rods, clipped on a stiff hinge with a PH Pop Up on and put it out to the back bank a rod length or so infront of the bench.

I have to admit I wasnt expecting much, it was a cold, wet day, so I thought it would take them a while to get on a bed of bait that big, so I was sat in the doorway of the van, soaking wet and a little cold scanning different areas of the lake incase one gave the game away. It cant have been 20 minutes when the rod over the bait bleeped a few times and pulled up tight, in a bit of shock I hopped out the van still in my T shirt and waded out a few meteres to get some depth to net the fish. It was a great scrap, but I knew fairly early on that it wasn't one of the lakes big girls. Eventually a big set of shoulders rolled on the surface and I slipped the net underneath a breeze block of a carp.

The rest of the evening was pretty quiet but I did see a fw signs to give me somewhere to start for my overnighter on Friday. Hopefully I can add to this series after that.

Nic