Into the madding crowd

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference."

- Robert Frost

The bug had initially bitten some three years beforehand. It was November 2018, and I had some leave from work remaining to take, yet the year was quickly running out. A week was booked off at the end of November for ‘something’ and without anything to fill it, a fairly off the wall and slightly unusual decision was taken one evening to head to the mecca that is Lac de St Cassien with less than two weeks’ notice. I had never fished outside of the UK at all at the time and my partner for the trip, despite having fished a lot in France probably hadn’t fished a lake bigger than ten acres in a decade but between us we decided we would be alright! Eleven days later, after a 900-mile overnight drive wedged into my Golf estate, we eventually pulled into the parking area at Gerrards. I remember looking out over the azure blue waters of the South Arm and turning to Jak, saying “Why the f*ck did I not do this ten years ago?”. I was overwhelmed by the lakes size and beauty and was immediately wrapped in its all-consuming atmosphere. Looking back on that afternoon, that was the moment I fell in love with the public lakes in France, from that point there was going to be no turning back.  

Several unsuccessful return trips to Cassien followed, then in September 2020 I embarked on a solo trip to a near 500-acre mountain barrage buried deep in the Midi Pyrenees. This may seem slightly crazy to some people, but I loved every minute of it. To this day it remains my most enjoyable angling trip for a whole myriad of reasons, not least the carp. This then fuelled the flames further to find the next venue and to plan the next trip. The feeling of solitude and adventure was simply exhilarating. Those who know me will know I am something of a bookworm and a bit of a carp nerd. As a result, I am well-suited to spending hundreds of hours scouring books, the web, social media and YouTube for possible destinations. I hate to think how many French, Dutch and German YouTube videos I have watched in recent years. I have slowly managed to track many an elusive venue down and I now keep a little book of possible destinations for future trips stored in my desk at home.

To me this is a huge part of the enjoyment of this type of fishing – the feeling of anticipation, trepidation and then endless planning. I can remember as a kid pouring over Ordinance Survey maps for anything blue, setting off on a mission with friends to find it like some angling equivalent of the young friends’ adventure in the film - Stand by Me, albeit with Welsh accents and in search of fish. We would enthusiastically talk each other into the possibility that this could be THE lake, the one that finally held the monsters of which we could only dream. They never did, but this fact would never dampen our enthusiasm ahead of the next fruitless quest and our optimism knew no bounds. As anglers it never does, even several decades later. My overseas trips have now come to feel like the grown-up version of those youthful endeavours. This time however the monsters could be real as opposed to imaginary and yet even knowing this, the feeling of mystery and the excitement that offers has become all consuming.

The pandemic then halted any plans in for almost a year. On three occasions I had to pull the plug on trips, once at less than 4 days’ notice when France went into a full lockdown. It was not until September 2021 I once more set off with a fully loaded car through the tunnel and into Europe. This was going to be a new venue in a new region of France. This is the story of that trip, to one of the lakes from my little brown book, warts and all as it didn’t turn out to be the best decision I have ever made, but I hope you enjoy it.

The lake itself is around 500 acres. It is a typical barrage for the part of France I was in, a drinking water reservoir surrounded by rich farmland with gently sloping banks and a maximum depth of around 25 feet. The bottom of the lake was almost completely featureless, comprised mostly of soft mud and clay of various consistencies. My research told me it had a reputation for doing some big hits of fish and held them to over fifty pounds but with limited night zones it could also be a very tricky adversary if busy. I knew that the time of year I was going I needed to be at the deeper barrage end, ideally facing it, and without any guarantee of getting in the areas I wanted to, had another two lakes nearby in my back pocket should I need to retreat to them.

I arrived at the lake around 13:00 on a Thursday afternoon. The previous day had seen me driving round the M25 to Tails Up HQ to collect my freshly rolled bait for the week, comprising of 80kg of 22mm Sea Monsta and a collection of specially made matching super hard hookers. I then spent the night at a cheap hotel a few miles from Eurotunnel and was up early for a 05:30 crossing. Travelling on my own and making some long drives, I find doing this means I am so much fresher when arriving at a venue due to not losing another 2 to 3 hours sleep just getting to the tunnel.

The drive in featured a bridge that dissects part of the lake that is a reserve, from here I could see one of the night fishing zones on the opposite side. As I crawled across the bridge, I could just about make out two boats in a swim in the reeds which lined this zone. A few minutes later I arrived at a car park at the end of a long track behind the other night zone to find one van there. I remember thinking this may be too good to be true. I walked for a few minutes down to the start of the night zone and the first swim, the one facing the barrage that I had made my number one choice was empty. I quickly made my way the few hundred meters along the remainder of the zone to find the van’s inhabitants who were in the last swim and furthest from where I wanted to be. I literally ran back to the car, not believing my luck, I sped back down the bumpy track (metaphorically speaking as drive a Berlingo) to the boat launch and as I turned the corner my heart sank. A van was backed to the water and an angler loading gear into a boat, I introduced myself and had a quick chat, he told me what I did not want to hear, he was of course going into the barrage swim. As if that was not bad enough, he told me he was only going in there as a tree had fallen in his favourite swim and he did not fancy trying to land fish there as a result. 500 miles of driving and I had been beaten to a swim by less than five minutes! Whilst it was madness to realistically expect to get in there, finding it empty and then losing it within a few minutes later left me feeling sick to the pit of my stomach. Talking to Simon as he was loading his boat, he informed me that he had friends fishing one of my ‘back up’ lakes and that it was absolutely rammed. The best part of a thousand acres and the night zones were all completely full and people were queueing for swims. “I came here to escape this sort of thing” I thought as I walked back to the car. The other back up lake was a completely unknown quantity but only 25 minutes’ drive away, I popped it into the Sat Nav and went straight there for a look.

As I drove alongside the lake, I could see the water level looked worryingly low. I parked in a walker’s car park, hidden deep in the forest that lines the eastern bank and set off for the water’s edge. The water’s edge however turned out to be about 40m from where it should have been. Some repairs were being done to the dam wall and as a result the level had been dropped massively. Whilst not quite Chantecoq levels of mud, you would have needed to have bivvied up at least 30 metres from the rods and then waded over and through this distance of knee-deep mud and dead vegetation (which was giving off a pungent aroma like rotting seaweed) to get to them. To say I did not fancy it was an understatement, this turned out to be a wise decision as 24 hours later the local Federation De Peche closed the lake to fishing, considering it too dangerous. That said, whilst the conditions were hideous, the lake itself and the setting were simply breath-taking, and I knew I would have to return another day. I was by now seriously getting the hump and headed back to venue number one to lick my wounds. A delay in my return caused by a ridiculous stand off on a single-track lane between a fuel tanker and a cherry picker that lasted around fifteen minutes did nothing to improve my mood. I honestly expected to find another few vehicles in the car park but only found the two I recognised. I walked back to the barrage swim and had a lengthy chat with Simon who it turned out was on his third trip to the lake. He had no issue with me going immediately to his left in the next swim (with the fallen tree in), however on further inspection if felt a bit close to him and did not sit right with me so I decided to skip it and went into the next swim along.

On lakes and trips like this, getting there is often the easy part and now the hard work started. The car was unloaded, the boat inflated and loaded with the required gear, bait, food and water, the motor was then parked back down the track about a quarter of a mile away from the launch pad before heading to the swim. At this point it is probably worth mentioning the unseasonably warm weather which was already present and forecast to last the next few days. The lake was flat calm, literally like the surface of a mirror and the temperature that afternoon around twenty-six degrees. It was getting on for 16:00 when I pulled the boat ashore, I knew I only had around four hours of daylight left so quickly popped the M3 Duo up on a bit of an awkward slope (no bark chip here) and threw everything inside. Then, sweating buckets and accompanied by a large halo of aggressive mosquitoes, I set a rod up, jumped into the boat and set off into the abyss to see what I had in front of me.

The short answer was not a whole lot. Aside from a uniform drop off about 35 yards out where the lake dropped from 12 feet to 18, the swim was mostly a shallow slope out to the middle of the lake, and I stopped around 200 yards out in twenty feet of water. After much zig zagging backwards and forwards, the only exception I could find to this rule was a raised stony area to my left around 80 yards out. It was an oasis of a feature in a desert of mud and screamed carp. After almost three hours in the boat, searching for anything unusual whilst donking a flat-bottomed lead around the whole time, the rest of the area was nothing but soft, deep, mud and clay. After a decade fishing gravel pits this wasn’t what I was hoping to find, however I was now committed and determined to catch some carp. The left-hand rod was dropped on this raised area with a light scattering of boilies around it and I was now fishing. The right had rod was then quickly dropped at the bottom of the shelf, again with a light scattering of bait around it.

As for the other two, well the lake has some rules fairly common to a number of public waters in terms of the maximum distance you can fish from the bank. As a result, the other two were staggered from 90 to 110 yards out across the front of the swim. This was not far given the lake was around over 600m across but at least for the first few days I needed to gauge what was going on and see if the Guard de Peche were going to make an appearance, and if they would test one’s adherence to the rules if they did. These both had an arc of 22mm Sea Monsta scattered in front of and behind the hookbaits in the hope of intercepting any travelling cyprinids making their way through the areas.

The rigs were straight forwards and initially a mixture of fluorocarbon D rigs (on the firmer ground) and coated braid combi rigs (on the softer ground), both around 8 inches long and culminating in a razor sharp, Cygnet Curve or Wide Gape hook in a size 2. These were baited with some specially made 22mm Hard Hookers, each one topped with a different colour 16mm pop up and fished as a snowman, finished off with an aperitif of a 3-bait stringer to avoid tangles on the drop. Dropping the rigs was a matter of slowly backwinding them down then a gentle pick up and drop again to hopefully ensure a better presentation and a straight hooklength.

I was now fishing and for some reason I was feeling stupidly confident of having one that first night and throughout the night several liners occurred. I made sure I was up before first light and scanning the water with the binos for any signs of carp. Unfortunately, the signs I saw were only of bream, some more bream and then some more bream. The place was literally alive with them, I sat for hours watching them fizzing and rolling on all the spots bar the raised area whilst the lines and bobbins twitched and danced as the snotty bin lids must have cleared each spot out of bait. The one encouraging sign I saw was around 09:30 that morning when a definite carp showed some way behind one of my markers. This was the sign I needed to be a little less compliant with the rules and that day my two long rods got a little longer. The only other thing of note that occurred that day was when reeling in. I was using the new Cygnet gripper leads which feature a recess which advantageously picks up bottom detritus on the way in, the mud I scooped out was super soft which lead to me lengthening the hooklinks to around 14 inches after having a good sniff of the leadcore to try and work out how far it had been buried. The link was the new 25lb Semi Stiff Cygnet Coated Braid that was on test at the time, behind that was the new Cygnet Leadcore which was attached to a long Mono Snag Leader (also on test from Cygnet) which culminated in my braided mainline.

The second night was a repeat of the first, lots of liners, bream, bream and more bream rolling and fizzing but with the added anti-climax of a dropped take on one of the long rods. I am 99.9% sure was one of my snotty nemeses picking the hookbait up and dropping the lead without getting hooked. The other long rod came in with the point noticeably less sharp than it had been the night before, which I assumed was also down to the bream relentlessly mouthing the hookbaits and playing with the rigs. I took a decision to change both rods over to size two noodles on wide gapes which due to the shrink angle and beaked point I hoped would prevent the points being dulled. Interestingly that morning, two more carp showed some way behind my long markers so once again that day they crept further out into the lake again. Now I often say I may be slow but I am not totally stupid, so I also took the decision to move the margin rod which had literally done nothing further out. Due to still being a little worried by a visit from the Guarde I marked my two other long spots with the GPS and then dropped this one in an area another 40 yards out meaning I was around 180 yards out by this point.

Alarmingly, by Saturday lunchtime both night zones were now full and the days only banks also had a row of people bivvied up fishing them. I had no idea where everyone had suddenly appeared from but must have had at least half a dozen people already ask me when I was going in various accents. I sat completely hemmed in, wondering why I was sat blanking, feeding a lot of breams, totally closed in and being asked when I was leaving!?!? I could have done this at home. The only thing that kept me thinking positively was that in the early hours we were expecting a complete u turn in the weather which until that point had remained stiflingly hot and with hardly a breath of wind. All that was about to change.

Sunday morning saw me up an hour before first light and as forecast, for once totally on cue, a large area of low pressure had moved in. A leaden sky was filled with ominous looking clouds and as I sipped my first brew of the morning the first spots of rain started gently pattering on the bivvy. They quickly gathering frequency and pace and shortly afterwards I was sat in a deluge as the wind now whipped up large waves which came crashing into my bank. It just had to happen. Around quarter to eight the right-hand, ex-margin and now longest rod, had the sort of drop back that makes you think your line has been cut. Due to the strong undertow I was using 30g weights which exacerbated the effect. I was already in my waders and F12 Torrents so ran to the rod and started winding like a fiend, the complete lack of any resistance gave me hope this was a carp and after retrieving what felt like a mile but was probably no more than thirty yards of line, the rod hooped over into a satisfying curve and I had hooked into my first carp. Hooking fish at range they usually just tend to kite a lot and this did exactly that and bar one moment where it tried to acquaint itself with the sunken tree next door, the fight was fairly eventful and I was soon looking down at a thirty plus common in the net. “That will do” I thought to myself as I smiled, knowing now I could catch them from here and pleased with my little tweaks of the day before. I looped the net over a storm pole and sloshed back to the bivvy through what was quickly becoming a quagmire to shelter from the relentless rain. Having not yet had breakfast I started to make a quick cup of tea before getting the rod back out and before the kettle had boiled one of the other rods absolutely tore off, literally the complete opposite to the preceding take. Out I went, back into the tempest and again after another mostly uneventful fight was staring down at a thirty something mirror in the other net. This was looped over the same storm pole as the other one and the fish left to recover by the boat whilst I got myself sorted out. Now I don’t mind saying at this point what followed was a combination of both stupidity and bad angling on my part. What I should have done is got both fish in retainers and got the rods back out as quickly as possible as clearly I had feeding carp in front of me and if I had known how short a window of opportunity this was going to be I think I would have done exactly that. Unfortunately I didn’t, so I set about getting the weighing and camera kit sorted. At this point Simon, who had seen me net the second fish, arrived in my swim asking if I would like any help with the photos, the fact he had packed up and left his gear in a boat getting soaked was massively appreciated as was his offer of help. He saw the two nets and laughed, having just suffered a similar three-night blank to me, I told him one of the rods was still in the zone, only about twenty yards from the last one that had gone and felt confident of a take on it. As I picked up my camera bag that’s exactly what happened. I would love to tell you this made things a hat trick of 30s or was even bigger but was one of the sorriest, seemingly undernourished excuses for a carp I had ever seen, it looked a truly wretched creature and was quickly returned home leaving me with no rods anywhere near where the action had occurred. With Simon’s help we weighed and photographed the common which had some nasty old tail damage, and the chunky mirror whose frame belied his weight at 32lbs before finally getting the rods back out by around ten.

Unbelievably, the weather system passed almost as quickly as it arrived. By 11:30 it was hard to believe I was sat in monsoon like conditions not even two hours previously (unless you looked down at the eight-inch-deep mud sucking at my waders with every step or course), the sun burned through the clouds and soon cast a long mid-day shadow across the swim helping dry the nets, mat and slings. I genuinely expected more action, but nothing whatsoever happened. I hoped the carp would return the following morning so spread a feast of Sea Monsta across the long rods. The only rod that hadn’t produced was the ‘feature’ rod, although it had started getting a lot of attention from crayfish which I had been (un) reliably informed were not in the lake. Fortunately, I had some wrap with me so applied this to the rod that went back out onto this as I was stubbornly determined to stick with it.

What followed in the coming days were literally copy and pasted from the first few. The weather was identical, the bream returned in their thousands and yet even more people had turned up, including some enterprising chaps fishing from a platform (which wasn’t allowed) 300 yards out, a short distance from the barrage. The only thing that was different however was a large algae bloom that was occurring, the water was turning a stale brown colour which was accompanied by an unusual odour and soon resembled whiffy oxtail soup. Still totally hemmed in, I remembered the words of the late great Rod Hutchinson writing about fishing Bivvy City on the Orient which he perfectly described as ‘corridor fishing’. I now knew exactly what he meant, I could move nowhere and do nothing other than creep further out into the lake which is what I did in the coming days.

To save repeating boring details I will skip to Wednesday when two things of note occurred, firstly meeting a pair of chaps from the Netherlands, Thomas and Stefan. Really nice guys and after talking to them for half an hour really felt for them. They left their homes at 2am which was 14 hours before I met them and had spent eight hours of that trying to find a swim somewhere in the area which was literally crazy for me to hear. I had not quite appreciated what a continental circuit water was like. It was as bad as the UK only bigger. They departed in good spirits however, heading for a section of river to fish a night and would then tour the lakes again in the morning. Secondly was something that really p1ssed me off. That was getting buzzed by a drone when I took a few things back to the car that day which I was sure was seeing if I was packing up. I just found it so unbelievably rude, intrusive and impersonal. Aside from the guys earlier and people either side of me I had not seen another angler in two days and was clearly someone else on the lake. Again, this was something of a wake up call for me in terms of circuit waters on the continent which some of the lakes in this area definitely were, I knew then that apart from the back up lake I visited, in all probability I would not come back to this place again. I was doing this to escape crowds not to sit in the middle of them being buzzed by drones. No thanks. By this point the weather forecast looked identical for the remainder of the trip and I was expecting no more action, went lighter with the bait and continued creeping down my corridor. That day I even checked Eurotunnel to see if I could get back a day early as was feeling rather downbeat and like I was just going through the motions with the only thing in my power to change being how far out I was fishing.

Just to prove me wrong, a random bite on Thursday morning just before first light (this time the rod was immediately repositioned) saw me landing what turned out to be the biggest fish of the trip, a lovely, long, lean upper thirty with a huge mouth. As I was taking some pictures in the warmth of the early morning sun, a tired looking Thomas and Stefan reappeared. They congratulated me on my fish and regaled me with more tales of woe from what sounded like an awful night on the river. They had then packed up and driven back round the lakes again early doors to find no swims free still and I really felt for the guys. I told them what time I was leaving the following day and that they were welcome to move in behind me if they wanted and gave them my word I would do my best to keep the swim for them. They thanked me for this and set off to fish the day and evening at the other end of the lake in the shallows, hoping some sunbathing carp were to be found there. I had even asked if they wanted to leave some gear in the swim to ‘reserve’ it, not something I would usually offer but given their luck wanted to do anything I could to help. They politely declined my offer which I appreciated hugely, they were clearly at the opposite end of the angling etiquette spectrum to the drone wielding strangers elsewhere on the lake.

Unfortunately, that bite turned out to be my last. Thomas appeared early Friday morning, their run of bad luck had sadly continued. Shortly after setting up, a trolling pike angler wiped out all their rods, cutting across the front of their swim about 30 yards out. Not to be deterred, they reset them all only for the same thing to happen again shortly before dusk. I could not imagine how annoyed and frustrated they must have felt and were now almost halfway through their session. We sat chatting for a few hours before I slowly packed up and by the time, I left we had swapped details and said we would stay in touch (which I am pleased to say we have and hopefully the guys are both coming over for a guest on one of my syndicates this year, having always wanted to fish in England).

On the way home from these trips, you have a lot of thinking time, I tend to drive to the crossing in silence, no music playing, and reflect on the trip. Most people overall would probably by disappointed with a week in France yielding three thirty pounders and a truly fugly little common but overall, I was pleased. Given the context of a massive lake you’ve never set eyes on before, challenging conditions, being hemmed in for five days, algae bloom I caught four fish. The whole section I was in the time I was there only did 14 I think, and the other night section did nothing so all in all I felt it was a reasonable result, which really could only have been made better for me by maximising the small window of opportunity I had that Sunday morning.

A few hundred miles later, my thoughts were cast back to a conversation Thomas had with a friend of his on the Thursday morning. He was told to ditch where they were and to up sticks immediately to go and join them on a large, days only reservoir a few hours drive away. His friend and his fishing companion had two days left on their trip and had so far caught over forty fish including sixteen over 20kg (44lb) up to 28kg (62lb) upon which it’s safe to say my ears pricked up somewhat. Thomas and Stefan politely declined, not wanting to tread on their friends’ toes and resolved to go and visit it another time. We spoke about the place prior to me leaving and I asked Thomas if he would not mind me acting on the information he had shared. I had researched the area it was in already and knew that some of the other reservoirs in the chain it was a part of had done numerous 25kg fish. It sounded like just the ticket. Apparently, most carp anglers avoided it due to the days only rule being strictly enforced due to a combination of the banks having residential dwellings, a large campsite, waterspouts centre and a sizeable nature reserve. This sounded even better to me given the week I had just sat through and before I had even reached the tunnel, I was running through the possible logistics of a trip to the place...

All the best and be lucky...

Al White

Aqua team member