Saint Cassien – Under the Sign of Whiskey
There it was. That feeling. The one I get every time I think back to that experience. Before long, the incredible old carp was safely in the landing net.
Lake Saint Cassien. Just hearing its name sends something magical through my body. Without question, it is the greatest legend among carp waters anywhere in the world, a place anglers from all over the globe have been travelling to for decades. I wanted to visit it simply because I wanted to be there. To soak up the atmosphere. I finally managed that for the first time in spring, in March 2006, and then again in winter, in January 2007. I described that first trip, which I will never forget, in my book Carp Secrets. The second trip was quite different. For one thing, I was arriving at the lake for the second time, which changed everything because I already had a much better idea of what the lake was like. I also wanted to change my tactics slightly compared with the first trip and decided to try drawing the carp in with a larger feeding campaign. On top of that, I had ten days to fish, half as much again as the previous time. Another advantage was that many Czech anglers were fishing the lake, including Tomáš Blažek, who knew Saint Cassien far better than I did and whom I was going to join. Tomáš and I have known each other almost since the very beginnings of carp fishing in the Czech Republic. Together with Jaromír Kratěna, we were the youngsters watching carp fishing develop rapidly in the Czech Republic at the time, fishing together and being there at the birth of the Czech Republic Carp Club alongside Jaroslav Vítek, Vlastimil Vápeník and other legends of Czech angling. So we had a lot in common, and we were really looking forward to the trip together.
I don’t know whether it’s still the same at Cassien, but back then the carp responded very well to very sweet boilies. What worked best for Tomáš was a sweet pineapple-flavoured boilie, as well as the white menthol pop-ups we were testing at the time, which I later named Carp Secret. With the advantage of this information, the day before I left I prepared a sufficient amount of boilies and pop-ups that the Cassien carp responded to well.
Just as on my first visit to Cassien, I started fishing by the bridge. Tomáš came down from the northern arm and we fished together from the same spot. There were a lot of Czechs on Cassien at the time. When I tuned in the radio, all we could hear was Czech. The first night, we found out how everyone was getting on. We had news from the south, the north and the west. We, however, started focusing on the large plateau that you can see from the bridge. When the water level drops, people also fish from that point. It is a very strategic spot where many, many legendary carp have been caught. The area by the bridge connects all three arms. When the fish are on the move, you could hardly be sitting in a better place. But I had no luck there, neither the first time nor the second. So after three days, Tomáš and I moved to the northern arm, where a spot had become free. There were lots of Czechs there and we were all squeezed in towards the dam. Tomáš settled in there, and Pepa Malý, who had come to Cassien with me, managed to get in as well. There was no room left for me, and I did not want to squeeze in with the boys and limit their fishing. So I drove to the other side of the northern arm and tried my luck there. I really liked it, so I baited a large area with Pineapple and placed a pop-up directly over the baited carpet, five centimetres off the bottom. This rig had already caught plenty of carp on Cassien, so I had faith in it. It is interesting how many carp have been caught on Cassien on pop-ups. Whenever I talked about Cassien with anyone, whether friends from the Czech Republic, Germany or Italy, most of them had positive experiences with pop-ups. The carp on Cassien love fruity, very sweet treats!
During the day, a snowstorm swept through and the hilltops turned into a true winter landscape. When the clouds cleared and the sun came out, I simply enjoyed the peace. I sat by the bivvy, drawing energy from the sunlight, the stillness and the unbelievably beautiful view across the lake. I opened a bottle of local wine, and the only thing missing from perfection was a bite. I breathed in the clean air and thought about the people crammed onto buses in the city smog, trying to make it to work on time. I breathed very deeply.
Then the boys radioed me with their first successes. Tomáš had landed a common carp and a mirror carp on a Pineapple pop-up. So it seemed the boys were in the right place. My rods had not moved at all, and I had not seen a single sign of fish activity anywhere around me. I did not have a good feeling about it. It got dark early, so I lay in the bivvy, stared into the darkness and thought. Then the radio under the bedchair crackled again and the boys told me it was literally like a swimming pool over there. The carp were jumping like mad and moving out from the dam. Lying there on the bedchair, I was going crazy and would have packed up and gone straight over to them if I could. The water in front of me was completely dead. I remembered the spring trip, when carp were jumping right over my rigs and I still could not get a bite. I was fishing fifteen metres from the bank with a pop-up positioned 15 cm off the bottom. Nicely scented. I sat on a rock by the water and watched the carp show. It was not just one fish. There were several of them. What was interesting was that at first they were only rolling, a bit like dolphins, and then they started jumping in the usual way. They were jumping very close to the bank, and the water was clear, so I could see that after each jump a faint cloud of silt rose behind them. The fish were feeding and tiny pieces of bait were falling from their gills. They were clearly feeding. And what crashes they made. They were leaping completely clear of the water. This was one of those moments when the old saying really applied: “Fish jumping, angler weeping!” The carp show lasted for about an hour, until they had cleared my spot of bait, and then they disappeared, who knows where. The next day I moved. At the new spot the carp did not jump at all, but I had a bite and landed a beautiful 21 kg mirror carp. I believe that once carp realise you are on the bank, they can become much more cautious and rarely make a mistake in your water. Back then I moved into the rocks, where I probably took a beautiful mirror carp by surprise, and the following night I had two bites, one of which produced a bluish 17 kg mirror carp. All of that ran through my mind in the northern arm as I waited for my first bite. When I fish alone, I replay all the experiences I have had on the bank. It is much easier than when you are fishing in a group. My head was full of ideas and thoughts. Late in the night, I finally fell asleep. In the morning, I was woken by an approaching boat. It was Tomáš, telling me he had another carp on the bank and also that Pepa had developed toothache and had to go home, so I should move into his place. Pepa had managed one carp of around ten kilograms in two and a half days. That was a much better result than mine. There was simply more activity on the other side of the bay. I kept convincing myself, because sometimes I can be very indecisive about whether to move or wait it out. One thing was certain: if I did not take Pepa’s place, I would not get another chance to sit there over the next few days. Cassien was packed as always. There was nothing to think about. A new hope had appeared. But while we were talking, my swinger suddenly pulled up against the rod and the spool started spinning. Tomáš jumped into the boat with me and we headed out onto the water. Oh, what a feeling. The sun was shining and a carp was fighting beneath the boat. I peered into the water, desperate to finally see it. Judging by the pull, it probably was not a giant, but you never know. Thanks to the clear water, I soon caught sight of it. It looked around ten or twelve kilograms. My first winter Cassien carp ended up in the landing net, and I felt as if I had come back to life!
We took the carp ashore and Tomáš took a photo of me with it. I leaned the rod against the bivvy, sat down and thought about what to do next. The situation had become a little more complicated. If that carp had not taken my bait, the decision would have been easy. Pack up and take Pepa’s place. Was it just a random fish? Or had they found my baited area, meaning I could expect more action? If I did not move, someone else would take the spot again. Tomáš went back to his swim. I needed a moment of peace and quiet to make up my mind. I kept asking myself different questions. In the end, I decided to move. There was no way to approach it logically, statistically, or anything like that. Fishing often is not logical. Sometimes you simply have to decide according to what you feel, and that is what I did then. I like discovering new lakes, but also new spots, even on the same water, so moving has never bothered me in the slightest. Especially since I am the kind of angler who brings a few pairs of socks, some tins of food and would rather sit on a bucket than carry a chair. So within ten minutes I was packed into the boat, and half an hour later I was occupying the other side of the northern arm. I no longer remember exactly which day of the trip it was. I think it was the fifth or sixth. Time was passing, but I still had enough days left to improve my result. Even though I was hungry, I bit into a half-hard baguette and set off to sound out the new spot.
To the left of my swim there was a rocky outcrop. The bottom dropped away quickly there, or more precisely, plunged straight down to a depth of 20 metres. I told myself it probably was not the most ideal spot. When I took the boat closer to the rocky bank, I noticed that in places the rock faces were covered in algae and there were freshwater snails living on them. It immediately struck me what easy food this could be for a carp. Just imagine it! The carp would not have to tilt itself awkwardly or dig anything out, it could simply “pick” aquatic life off the wall and eat some greens (algae) along with it. All it had to do was rise up from the deeper, more comfortable and warmer water and it could feed. Without wasting much energy. This whole theory flashed through my mind in a matter of moments. I had to get a rig in there somehow. Tomáš and I had already been fishing with a breakaway system for a year or so, so we were pretty good at presenting a bait across a bay or over a tree, but how were we supposed to present a rig on the face of a rock wall?
I had it. I wedged a stick into the rock and suspended the rig from it on a breakaway line. The ideal angle of the rock for positioning the rig only extended down to a depth of one metre. “Hm... that’s not exactly much, but why not give it a try,” flashed through my mind. The gentle angle of the rock meant that the line did not run through the water column but lay against the rock face. I arranged everything by hand exactly as I needed it. I camouflaged some parts of the rig as well, and finally attached the main line to a breakaway float on the stick. Only then did I open the spool and take the rod back by boat to the bankstick. From the rod tip, the line ran for about 50 metres through the air to the stick in the rock. There it was tied to the float with 0.16 mm line, and from there it went straight down into the water. My idea was that if a carp took the bait, the weak line would snap and the small float, attached to the main line with a clip, would shoot away from the rocks and keep the line at a safe distance from the sharpest edges. Well, I certainly had fun coming up with that one.
I had rigged a single trimmed boilie. For bait, I crushed some softened boilies and made them into a paste. I pressed it into cracks between the rocks so it would stay in place instead of sliding down into the depths. I could not think of anything else. I also clouded the water around the spot a little with crushed boilies, trying to make a kind of boilie soup. All I wanted was to put a trail of food into the water. It was simply worth a try. Later that night, looking at the rod tips in the moonlight, I told myself I must be crazy. What sort of stupid idea had I come up with this time? When Tomáš came over to visit me by boat, we joked that the most I would catch there was some prehistoric rock creature. But a little while later, when the rod tip trembled and then straightened, I suddenly became serious. The line went slack, the breakaway snapped and I grabbed the rod and started winding in. I could not feel any resistance. I had no idea whether an owl or a bat had flown into the breakaway line. I reeled in the slack and after a while began to feel a slight resistance. Nothing much. “Ah, some nice bream has pecked that one up,” my mate joked. I leaned into the rod and pulled the fish towards me faster. When it was a few metres from the bank, it suddenly felt a little heavier. “Aha, a small carp, not a bream,” I said, pleased. I asked Tomáš to unhook it for me. He switched on his headtorch and suddenly shouted, “Holy shit, you’re fucking kidding me. That’s no fucking bream. That’s a pig. Fuck, that’s a good fish, definitely over twenty!” The reel clutch started spinning and with one short burst the fish dived back into the depths. It did not have much strength, that was true, but in a second the blood was racing through my veins at an insane speed. There it was. That feeling. The one I get every time I think back to that experience. Before long, the incredible old carp was safely in the landing net. The tension gave way to an explosion of euphoria and I was beside myself with happiness. Straight after the photos, I went into the water with the carp, still fully dressed. It was freezing cold, but the carp needed it. I helped keep its body balanced and supported it as it swam away. It was a genuine old warrior. Once it had disappeared back into the depths, I started putting a few things together and before long headed out into the darkness in the boat. Where else but back to those rocky spots where the biggest bream come from! The carp really were there, so I took more than half of the bait I still had left and spread it over the area. I used around 20 kg of Pineapple and some tiger nuts. “Blažena” was feeding in a similar way on the other side, so between us we had the whole bay baited with the same food. The cards were on the table!
The following days brought plenty of catches, and we kept shuttling across the bay so we could take photos of each other. We were living through incredible moments that are simply impossible to forget. I do not remember exactly how the story started, but in one magazine Karel Nikl described his trip to Cassien, where he had taken a bottle of whisky with him in case he caught a twenty-kilo fish. Since he did not manage it, he hid the bottle somewhere unknown and announced through the media that the first Czech to catch a carp over twenty should get in touch and he would reveal where he had hidden it. Anyone who knows “Blažena” knows it did not take him long to find that bottle. Back when we were still sitting by the bridge, “Blažena” got up, carefully searched the area and started turning over stones. I remember thinking we probably needed a fish soon, because this blank spell was doing strange things to people. He kept rummaging around and after a while came back with a bottle of Jameson and said: “We’re going to the north, and we’re taking this bottle with us so we don’t have to come back for it!”
I remember that moment as if it had happened only a little while ago. The temperature was around five degrees and freezing rain was pouring down on us. One take followed another, and in our soaked clothes we scrambled over the rocks, trying to capture those moments of happiness for each other on camera. It was around lunchtime. It had been an incredible morning. By the time we had already landed several carp over 20 kg and met up for a moment in the bivvy, “Blažena” pulled the bottle out from under the bedchair and sent Karel a text back in the Czech Republic saying that the Jameson was flowing freely. We really enjoyed that day, in fact the whole trip. It was a trip that had everything. Speaking for myself, I can say that I struggled quite a bit at the beginning, and perhaps if I had not made it down to the dam, I would have left Cassien defeated. That is probably how it would have ended. I hardly need to tell any angler just how much the swim matters and how important it is to find the fish.
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