A Dream Come True
My name is Elbert and I’ve been fishing for as long as I can remember. My favorite style of fishing Is boat fishing for large carp.
Even though I went on countless fishing trips and spent many days on the lake shore, I just couldn’t get past the 20kg threshold. After long conversations, I decided together with my friend, Alex, to go on 72h fishing trip on Varlaam Lake. All said and done. After a few days making preparations, we excitedly unloaded our tackle on the shore of Varlaam Lake. It is a superb lake, a gravel pit with a dense carp population.
Although at first sight it may seem quite easy to catch a big carp on a lake that exclusively houses such specimens, it is actually shooting very far from the mark. A gravel pit with very big depths, between 3 and 8 meters, with crystal-clear water and with lots of natural food and very squeamish carp.
I started the fishing session by searching for the hot spots of the swim, such as structures and thresholds that could attract and make capital carp feed. After finding the spots, I buoyed them so as to make finding them easier when the need to refresh the hook baits arose. I tied the rigs and used critically-balanced Monster Trap boilies as hook baits.
It is a fishing style that requires a lot of patience, as the bites are few and far between and bait hook refreshment is never usually done earlier than 24 hours.
I managed to catch an 18kg grass carp on first night, while Alex managed to land two carp between 16 and 18kg, but we were far from happy, as these weren’t the fish we were hunting for.
Our fishing session was nearing its end, and we’d only managed to land a total of 6 fish, with the largest of them weighing 19.850kg. We were bound to vacate our swims at 12 o’clock. Alex looked at his watch and told me it was 10 o’clock and that we should start packing our tackle, as a long 450-km road back home awaited us. I told him I wanted to stay until the end.
At a quarter to 12, bite alarm 1 went off and the drag began letting out the line as if the spool were burning. After a 40-minute drill from the boat, I finally managed to land the fish I had been searching for for a few years. A beautiful 20.5 kg common carp. Perseverance, patience, strategy and a quality boilie helped me set a new over-20 kg personal best.
Thank you, Lake Varlaam, thank you Bucovina Baits! Tight lines!!
Elbert Stan (now a large carp angler)
