Over the last few years Spring has been a really important time of the year for me, this is the only time during the year when i have the possibility to leave home for few days for a “proper” carp fishing session. Family and work duties force me to fish quick overnight session and sometimes only few hours during the rest of the year, so you can imagine how much i look forward every year for my Spring session !!
Even if it can be really challenging and the outcome of the session is never sure i love to fish big natural lakes, and this year session was planned for a big lake in the north of Italy, a place for which i have special feelings and great memories from the past years.
You think for hours, days and weeks about how to approach the lake during the session, and once your plan is in place and you feel confident something happen and you need to re-think everything from the beginning…The Spring is a lovely time of the year but probably also the one with most variables which drammatically effect carp behaviour and activity, and this is exactly what happened to me.
After a relatively long period of stable and nice weather we were confident to find good number of carp approaching the spawning areas, but only few days before our session the weather decided to go crazy and all of a sudden it was Winter again !!
For a number of reason it was not possible for us to change spot at that time, so once we arrived at the lake on Sunday morning we loaded the boat under a light rain and headed straight to our swim. Setting up the base camp under the rain and cold wind is nothing funny but as we all know it’s just part of the game !!
First night was quite with no action at all, but then the morning after we’ve been blessed by a little but of sun, just enough to warm up a bit the shallow area we were fishing and from the second night we started to see some serious action. Fishing long distance can be quite demanding when it start to be hectic, we were fishing at a range of over 400 meters, and when you have to deal with 4 or 5 fish every night at that distance there is no time for sleep !!
During the following days we’ve been lucky enough to have a good number of carp visiting our unhooking matt, nothing really “heavy” this time, but some truly beautiful fish with unique scale patterns.
All in all we must say also this trip has been a success, started not in the best way because of the weather but we managed to adapt our approach pretty well and we were able to head back home with some more pictures of stunning and wild fish and one more good experience for our diary !!
By Marco Bortone
Photo credit Marco Bortone
