Joy Lake France, 13th June
23/06/2009
Sat 13th June 2009
Me and my mate went to France to a little lake called ‘Joy Lake’, we took a wide variety of boilies just so we had plenty of options to choose from. On arriving at the lake we had a walk around to see what swim we wanted to fish as there was no one else booked on the lake. After picking our swims on the far bay of the lake towards the deeper end where it was around 4 – 5 feet deep we set up all our gear.
After reading all the articles on the lake there was only one type of boilie that was catching at the lake but we were confident in our chosen flavours. I started off fishing one rod on the 15mm Tutti Mega Fish Boilie on the far bank under a overhanging tree fished over pellets and around 20 boilies.
After a couple of days without a pickup i decided to pack up and move down to the shallow end of the lake where the carp had all moved to due to the weather and no pressure down that end of the lake. After setting back up I had my one rod fished on Tutti Mega Fish Boilie 15mm fished in-between 3 separate patches of lily pads with around 40 freebies thrown in. I was fishing with a 3oz Korda square lead on a Nash safety clip set up with a TFG braid which I coloured myself to the lakebed colour with a size 6 Gardner hook.
It wasn’t till 2.30am in the morning when this rod decided to scream off and produce a nice 22lb Mirror.
After the next 24 hours the shallow bay had gone all quiet and the carp had moved up to the deeper end of the lake so I packed up my rods and moved just for the day down to the deep bay where I had heard the carp crashing all night long. After 3 hours of getting my rods out my Tutti Mega Fish rod bent round and started to scream off again.
This produced a gorgeous 18lb 2oz Mirror. It was off the same set up as the 22lb Mirror but fished on the edge of lily’s over a handful of pellets and around 10 freebie boilies scattered around. Throughout the rest of the day I didn’t have a pick up on this rod and went back to my swim for the night. After another quiet night in the shallow bay I moved to the middle of the lake. I then fished my Tutti rod on the far bank with the same set up but with just a pva bag containing around 6 boilies in it. Throughout the night I had a screaming run on this rod but resulted in a hook pull so I recasted to where I roughly put it before darkness and within an hour the rod went screaming off again and produced a 14lb 14oz carp.
The next day I recasted this rod in the morning on to the far bank and left it for the day. Around 3pm it screamed off tearing line off like I’ve never seen before so as I striked in to it the carp headed for the big lily patch which resulted in it swimming past a small patch first which frayed my line and snapped me off.
So in all, my one rod I used with the Tutti Mega Fish proved to be a top bait on a lake that was fishing really hard on another brand boilie.
Tight Lines
Colin Crowhurst