Crazy 30 hour session at Les Levades May 2010

This first week of May I had the opprtunity to fish a short session at Les Levades with my friend Keith Williams of VIPER bait boats, who was in France on a business trip and who had asked if we could do an overnighter at the venue.

We arrived at the lake at around 10:00 on Wednesday to find the venue looking absolutely stunning in its spring colours, and straight away I saw a couple of good fish cruising in the upper layers. The water at Les Levades is very clear at present and I could see the bottom clearly in 4ft of water.

With a very warm day forecast Keith elected to put up his bivvy straight away, whilst I went for getting my baits out in the lake ! Within 20 minutes
I had the first fish on the bank, and what a start to the session - a lovely long mirror of 38-00 !

By the time Keith had finished sorting his gear out, I had put three fish on the bank, and this hectic action continued almost continually, in fact it was almost impossible to get three rods in the water at the same time and I decided to fish with 2 rods.

Shortly after positioning his baits, Keith was in on the action and was enjoying the hard fighting qualities of the Les Levades carp - you have
to experience this to believe it, these carp really do go - if I had lost a couple of low 20's that I had during the session I would have sworn
that they were much bigger ! Several times I had the rod locked up with a carp trying its utmost to reach a tree on the far bank, real exciting
stuff ! Nearly every fish fought long and hard, and it was difficult to tell how big they were until you could actually see the fish.

By the time darkness fell, I had landed 14 carp and with 2 more superb fish of 35-00 and 40-12, plus a common of 25-00, I was more than pleased
with the days catch, and decided not to fish the night. Also it had been an absolute scorcher of a day with the temperature in the high 20's
and I was cream crackered !

Keith decided that he would carry on fishing and it turned out to be a good decision as at 01:45 I was woken up to find out that he had landed the big common at 39-08 ! Job done and another happy angler who now decided to wind in, having caught 15 fish and in the interest of having some kip.

Thursday morning, we started fishing again, and today it was deciedly quiet in my swim, which was nice as it gave me time to regroup and enjoy the scenery ! In Keiths swim, however the carp were still avidly munching away, and amongst the low 20's, at 10:30 Keith banked his best carp of the session at 40-10.

At around this time, the action started again in my swim, but it seemed as though the better fish had moved away from the area, leaving me with lots of very hard fighting fish in the low to mid 20's which gave some incredible scraps and kept me entertained for the next few hours. By lunch time we had caught so many fish that we were now just fishing single hookbaits - and still cacthing, albeit at a reduced rate which was now more acceptable !

Keith went on to land another super looking mirror of 37-00, along with several upper 20's, and when we left the lake at 15:00 we had lost count of the total number of fish landed, but it was somewhere between 50 and 60 fish !

Baits used were Premier Matrix and Mainline Activ-8 by myself, whilst Keith was using Mainline's new Grange. The carp came from several areas of the lake and we used the bait boats to deliver about 30 crushed boilies and around 200 grams of several different sizes of pellets to keep the fish interested.