Angling Lines blog

One of our owners, Dagan at Oakwood asked me the following question;

We want to have a net dip on site.  Obviously there are many different ways of making up net dips but are you able to let me know of what any of your other venues are using in France?

I sent the question out to all our lake owners & here’s a selection of the responses… I must admit I’ve been surprised at the range of views;

**************************

We find the safest way is to provide the net heads and the anglers bring their own handles this eliminates the use of net dips. But if you do need a good disinfectant Malachite Gold is the one to use.

**************************

Best way is permanganate de potassium.  Easy, cheap and the most effective.

You put a small amount of powder in a 200l tank and dip what you want for few minutes.

I use it to dip ill fish and have saved several.  It kills mushrooms, bacteria’s, parasites etc.

A very small quantity of powder is needed for hundred litres of water. A kilo will last years.

**************************

There is no need for dips !!!

Just make sure all nets are bone dry for 48 hours and there is no need for dips in our experience.

************************** continue reading…

Part 2 of John London’s article describing his experiences of buying Bletiere – you can read part one here.

After all the excitement of finding your dream new home in France, complete with a lake to die for, the hard part now starts… and that’s the paper work in France.  It’s a killer and there’s a lot of it!

The following is in no way the ultimate legal advice on French property buying and laws.  Again it’s just our experience, but hopefully it will save you falling into some of the traps we encountered. Others may have had a different experience, but it’s what happened to us and it may help someone else save a lot of time which we lost.

Permissions

I would firmly advise anyone to check the lake and its permissions even before you go as far as putting in offers.  Just because it’s a lake does not mean you can fish it!

To put it simply you either have a ‘closed’ or ‘open’ lake.

I would advise anyone to go for a closed lake as it’s less hassle (I can hear the keyboards going already!)

The simple explanations I was given by the garde-pêche  is that an ‘open’ lake usually has a river or stream flowing into them, so its potentially harder to control your fish.  A ‘closed’ lake has no natural exits so fish cannot escape into local rivers or streams.

continue reading…

March 1st, 2010

The aim of this years re stocking at Mas Bas was to increase the numbers of 30’s. Gilles went up to the fish farmer at La Brenne in the west of France and picked 21 beautiful mirror carp, all between 30 and 35lb.

As you can see from the photos they are in absolutely prime condition and after the five hour journey, were eager to investigate their new home.

17 were put into the Main Lake and 4 into Lotus Lake.

These additional fish should provide some great sport for our visitors this year.

You can see more photos here

When we have guests fishing here, other than the obvious questions about tactics, the question asked most often is how did we start on the road to our dream.

I have long wanted to put pen to paper as they say and help others who want to follow us over here and so this is it… well at least a start!  The following views and ramblings are mine and Lesley’s view and no one else’s and we suspect others may have had different experiences, but this is how it happened for us.

Where do you start when think you might want to move to France?

Well the first thing to do is to holiday over here and visit the areas you think you would like to live.  Don’t even think about buying a lake… just enjoy the trip and look at the lifestyle, what’s in the area and is it for you. continue reading…

Continuing our series of posts from lake owners detailing their experiences of moving to France & buying a carp lake here’s a post from Andrew, the owner of Molyneux ;

The beautiful Molyneux Lake

Learning French

Maybe a strange topic for venue management but if you’re living in France it’s goes without saying how important it is speak the local language. The good news is that it’s not a particular difficult language to pick up; the number of words that are the same in English and French but with a slightly different pronunciation is remarkable. The CD language sets and having lessons is a good way to start but there is nothing better than regularly speaking French to French people. The secret is to not be afraid to try to speak French. The French, will generally, make an effort to understand you if you make an effort to speak French and it’s surprising how much more helpful they can be if you speak French!

continue reading…