French success for young fieldtester 21st September, 2011

Young Mainline fieldtester, Perry Hawkins has been in touch after recently taking some time away from fishing his target water at Dinton Pastures to make his first ever fishing trip to France. L'Etang de Cherpont  was the destination and it didn’t take long for the 17year old carper from Wokingham to come to grips with his first challenge across the channel. Perry takes up the story:  “I’d been looking forward to this trip for just short of a year and finally the day had come that we were on the coach on our way to Dover to cross the channel into France. Quite a long journey to Cherpont, South East of Paris, about 8 hours on the coach, but I can assure you it was worth the wait.

We arrived around 8am Saturday, had a fry up and a brew before we drew swims, I came out second to last and chose a central swim, which from all my research, I knew could produce fish whichever way the wind was blowing. I set up the main bits in my chosen swim, SOS and cast out towards the centre of the lake where the old river bed used to run. This area was about 4-5ft deep, with a bottom consisting of smooth silt, so I clipped-up and cast my rods across this feature at 70, 80 and 90yards range. I also decided to just start off with singles and little bags due to the lake being pelted with bait the week before, 2 rods on Cell hook-baits with little bags of response pellet and the other on active-8.

Without a take to the quick bite approach, the following day I decided to keep with the bags, but increase the amount of bait with a kilo of mixed Cell and Activ-8 boilies and continued to top up my areas like this until Tuesday when I received my first take of the session, resulting in a cracking 32lb common! The next night things got even better when I landed big framed Cherpont mirror at 43lbs, followed by a 29lb mirror the next morning. During the middle of the day on Wednesday, I was helping a close friend net a fish when I got a screamer on my left hand rod, a 40.02 common the culprit and as I was playing this my dad had to lift into my right hand rod as that was away as well!

My dad passed me back the rod and I landed another big fish weighing 41.02! I couldn’t believe it, two 40's at once; this was the best angling experience of my life so far! I kept topping up the bait every day as consistency is very important to me when fishing, eventually going through almost 20kilos of boilies and landing 8 fish included another big common, just over 36lbs before it was time to head back to England”