Last Knockings for the Trout Season

THE LAST SATURDAY IN SEPTEMBER IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO FISH FOR TROUT UNTIL MARCH NEXT YEAR

If the river or lake is classified as Category 1 then you cannot fish there outside of the trout season, not even for coarse fish or predators. I discovered recently that the Haute-Vienne Department has opened a new lake trout fishery this season. It is situated not too far from Oradour-sur-Glane and you can get full details from the Departmental website by typing “pêche 87” into your favourite search engine. I understand that day tickets are available at €20, but the cheapest way to fish is to pay €50 extra when you renew your Carte de Pêche in the 87 Department for a season permit.

Bleak Expectations

I have been fishing the River Charente in the Angoulême - Cognac region recently and noticed that the river seems to be alive with bleak this year. Whenever I put feed into the water for bream, barbel or roach, thousands of bleak are attracted to the free offerings. These ravenous midgets will take treble maggot and double sweetcorn baits even when ledgered. If bleak went to 40lb I would not dare swim in the river! I have reverted to fishing whole maize grains and pigeon peas or small boilies just to defeat the bleak. Another way to amuse yourself when the bleak hoards pester you is to catch them on light poles or whips. You would have to go some way to beat the 1,600 fish for 71lb caught by Hadrian Whittle on the River Wye, but it could give you some sport when it is too hot for the more worthy species. Interestingly, Adrian ‘wasted’ 20 minutes catching 6 roach and a dace before deciding that if you can’t beat the bleak you can at least catch them. In the last hour alone he caught over 420 fish. That is one every 8.5 seconds.

Of course, attracting the bleak then attracts predators, so my most recent cunning plan is to harvest a few bleak to use as baits and fish a dead bait on a second rod to hopefully catch a large perch or zander that is prowling around the bait fish. Will it work? I’ll let you know.

Weather or Not

The oppressive heat of the last two summers has created problems in when and where to fish. The last two years however seem to have changed what can be caught. Writing this at the end of July I have one barbel to my name this year despite having fished the same areas and using the same tactics as were successful in the past. Even the carp have been lethargic and not presented the same stalking opportunities. Bream however, and the bleak mentioned above, seem to thrive in the hot weather. Other reliable summer species are rudd and carassins, the almost identical cousin of the crucian. If these hot summers become the norm it might cause a re-think of summer tactics. Maybe getting up at the crack of dawn to fish before the sun gets up is the answer? By the end of this month we should see temperatures dropping and possibly rainfall, what the locals call the second spring. That will liven things up, and for me September and October mark the start of the best time of the year. Many species seem to feed more heavily as the water temperature begins to cool. By then we shall also see a decline in the numbers of anglers at the waterside as children return to school and holidaymakers return home. It will be nice to get back to normal.

Fish Finders

Fish tend to inhabit locations that give them security, food, and comfort, and there are often long stretches of lake and river banks that are devoid of fish because the above criteria are not met. Conversely you can sometimes find fish crammed close together in an otherwise barren stretch and the reason for this is not evident from our bankside locations.

Over the years I have found benefits in plumbing likely swims to check the depths, type of bottom and in rivers, the flow. These days it is far easier and much more accurate to use one of the electronic sonar options to survey the places of interest in rivers and lakes.

The least expensive is the type that you can cast out and retrieve, viewing the information the sonar sends to a small LCD screen on a hand-held receiver. These start at around €40 and are surprisingly good.

The most interesting type is the one that transmits its data to your mobile phone via its own Wi-Fi hotspot. The sonar is cast out and retrieved or fastened to the

By Clive Kenyon

transom of your boat and the data is recorded on an App that you load onto your smartphone. Once the survey is completed you can upload the data to a web program that gives more detail than can be viewed on your phone, and can be printed or shared with others. These obviously are more expensive than the other types and it must be said are not perfect. The maps do not always align and you can find your chosen swim overlaid onto dry land. However, with a bit of intelligent interpretation and the use of other resources such as a camera, compass, and written notes, you can quickly build up an accurate and very useful map of the lake or river bed and have sightlines and distances recorded to enable you to cast to the fish holding features.

The beauty of using sonars is that you can rule out places that are snag pits before losing fish or tackle to those snags, and you regularly discover places where fish are located for no reasons obvious from the bank. These units are usually referred to as Fish Finders yet that particular aspect is probably the least useful for our purposes. It is common for fish to be graded in three sizes; large, medium or small. Imagine trying to fix those distinctions to species as varying as bleak and wels catfish. The cheaper sonar units also transmit pulses that can in some cases record the same fish multiple times as it slowly drifts over the surface. It is possible, with the more sophisticated types, to adjust the settings to give a better idea of what is lurking below, and with a bit of experience you will be able to identify that the large fish showing at 1.7 metres in a 2 metre depth isn’t cruising just off the bottom, but 1.7m is where the top of its back is. Its mouth might be right on the bottom seeking out food. Just like using a lead plummet to discover whether the bottom is hard gravel or soft mud, it takes experience to interpret the findings. Armed with such a device it is possible to identify fishy looking places much more quickly than when using a conventional float and lead plummet, and this is enhanced by your watercraft, but it’s not a replacement for it. You will still need to interpret the data received and apply that to weather conditions, time of year, and other factors.

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