- July 07, 2024

Moulin de Gassas 2024

28-06-2024

The annual visit to Bergerac in France did not get off to a very good start…

I had not been feeling well prior to the holiday and had managed to get an appointment with my doctor. (An achievement in itself these days). She had called for an ECG (heart trace) as I had been feeling tired and listless and had dizzy spells.

The day before we were due to catch the plane out, I got a call in the afternoon from my GP.

“Mr Spreadbury, get yourself to the Emergency Department at Medway Maritime Hospital because there are anomalies on your ECG trace.”

“What?.. What does that mean?”

Long story short, a few hours before we were due to fly we had to make a decision as to whether we could go or cancel. The doctors, although giving me a ‘fit to fly’ endorsement referred me to a cardiac team for further investigation. This was extremely worrying and put a right ‘damper’ on proceedings I can tell you, but here were once again standing on the banks of the lake in the gorgeous location in the middle of the Dordogne region of central France.

Like all my trips to Peter and Madeline’s lovely estate, I had a plan...

I wanted to compare the performance of two rigs I had been playing around with for a while and the fishing at the Moulin was the ideal place to try this out.

Which of these two was going to be the most successful?:

The top one of the two is a Slip ‘D’ Rig constructed from coated braid, stripped back to form the familiar loop, secured in place by 0.7mm dia. Silicone tube, the size 4 Curve shank being interchangeable.

The bottom rig is a Fluorocarbon ‘D’ Rig constructed from 20lbs. IQ2 with 12 turns to form the ‘D’ and a small piece of putty to help the hook drop into the bottom lip of the carp. This rig had been extensively tested and found to be perfectly aligned to catch in the bottom lip when the boily was lifted off the bottom. I made it short because an essential part of the presentation was a four-bait stringer accompanying the hook bait; the carp, engulfing all baits and not knowing which one was attached to the hook, thus hooked itself.

My chosen swim to start things off was the ‘Tackle Out’ peg.

This is a short-range peg between two waterlilies beds at the lake's top end. A light scattering of boilies put out between the lily beds to kick things off. I didn’t have very long to wait…

Ten past nine on the first morning and the short rig is away. The usual tense struggle in the shallow water resulted in a 20:08 mirror perfectly hooked in the bottom lip.

There’s nothing like a plan coming together and the event was repeated a couple of hours later when I was rewarded with a similar event involving a 19:08 mirror.

In both cases, the coated braid Slip D Rig lay a few feet away apparently untouched. Two fish was enough to convince me it was superior to the Slip 'D' and although I may have stuck to to the same duel trial to prove the point, I decided to switch over to the presentation on both rods.

The only other alteration I made to the rig was the stringer:

I played around with tying the boilies into a group tying them to the hook and also just threading them onto the PVA one behind the other. It didn’t seem to make much difference which when you think about it, once the fish start ‘fanning’ with their pectoral fins, the boilies would end up all over the place. There is no possibility the boilies will sit neatly arranged in a pattern on the bottom!

Day One was completed half an hour after this fish with another one hooked perfectly in the bottom lip:

29-06-2024

Day Two followed a similar pattern and turned out to be my most successful of the trip, landing four and losing one:

A 19:08 mirror

A 24:00

A 27:12

And last but not least, a lovely 32:12 which turned out to be the biggest of the whole week.

At Moulin de Gassas there is a distinct difference in the size and shapes of the fish.

There are old original fish which were in residence when Peter and Madeline acquired over the property. These fish were of questionable heritage and had been in the lake for years. No one knows where they came from; likely they were put in by a previous owner.

Then there are shorter, fatter, more appealing shaped fish which Peter himself has sourced from a local fish farm. These fish have done well, fed on pellets daily by Peter on his usual morning walk around the lake with Barty the dog. The pellets don’t look like the ones we are used to and remind me more of agricultural pellets than those typically bought in a fishing shop but Peter tells me they are what is recommended by the fish farmer.

I won’t bore you with a long drawn out tome of day-by-day happenings other than to say the weather this year was extremely peculiar. One minute we’d be roasting in thirty-degree heat - the next, donning fleeces to keep out a cold wind. The fish didn’t like these up-and-down temperatures as being so shallow, the lake reacted swiftly to variations in temperature and we suffered some lean spells.

Here’s a summary all the same:

30-06-2024