TOUR DE FORGE

TOUR DE FORGE

Down here in Bled May 2019 has been awful, it’s now five years since I moved here and before that i’ve been fishing Lake Bled countless times in May over the last 15 years. I can not remember such a horrible May weather wise. Rain, rain, more rain and cold. Of course we are a stone throw away from the Alps, so it can happen, nothing strange, but when it goes on and on for nearly a month you start to get a bit tired of it… 
So I was sitting in my office like almost every day pretending I was working, watching out of the window the dark grey sky and the rain pouring down when a whatsapp message on my phone woke me up. It was my old friend Felix Van Der Marel from Holland, with a pretty short message : “buddy, I need to go fishing”, that short message made my day and in a blink of an eye I was already back in carp fever modality !! My reply has been pretty short and clear as well : “that’s an easy fix mate, just get a flight ticket and i’ll take care of the rest”.

In a matter of few days the all thing was sorted and with the van fully loaded of carp gear and baits I was at Ljubljana airport drinking a coffee and waiting for Felix. This time fishing Lake Bled was not an option, with the new rules there was no more licenses available so we decided to take a pretty long drive and to fish a small lake up in the Croatian mountains. I’ve been fishing this lake already quite some years ago, and for Felix it was a brand new destination so we were both excited to fish the next 3 days and night over there.

           

I knew that lake was a bit of a nightmare to fish because of the weeds, but this time I was actually happy about this “problem”. I was on the final stage of testing some new products and such an environment was the perfect playground for my final tests, plus, having Felix with me would have been even better as I could count on the opinion and feedback from another carp angler with a massive experience on his shoulders.

          

Arrived at the lake we decided to start our session in a central position, there was no one else fishing so from this spot we had the possibility to spread our rods in many different spots, but after the first night the results was not as we were expecting, with just one fish for Felix at the first lights in the morning, so after a good coffee we decided to move on the upper part of the lake, where because of the shallow water we were sure to find more carp swimming around in this time of the year.

          

10AM of the second morning and we were already fishing the new spot and 2 hours later there was already 2 more nice carp in our photo book !! 
I was extremely happy, not just because of the fish caught but also because both of them was caught with our new products under really tough conditions and the new Fluorocarbon Ronnie-D and the Fluorocarbon Fused Loop Chod performed extremely well.

We were fishing small clear holes in the middle of a huge underwater garden basically and every fish had to be pulled out from that big green mess, in this situations there are millions of things that can go wrong but luckily enough this time we didn’t lost a single fish.

          

The session ended up with 5 fish landed and tons of laugh and good memories in a fantastic place where nature and the quality of fishing are second to none, for sure a place we will fish again in the near future, hoping to meet one of the few old and fat resident !

        

By Enrico Parmeggiani & Felix van der Marel