Angling Lines Blog

Steph & Chris Dagg run Notaires & Alder/” target=”_blank”>Alder lakes. Through this personal Blog, Steph is going to describe her experiences of moving to France and living the dream of many UK carp anglers.

I finally made my long overdue trip to the archives in Gueret. I’m so glad I did. I’ve barely made a start on finding out the history of our estate, Les Fragnes – who built it, who lived here, what they did – but I’ve already uncovered one fascinating and significant fact. Our large lake, Alder Lake, is a pre-Napoleonic lake. That is huge in lake terms, since these historic lakes have all sorts of privileges and exemptions from normal regulations controlling plans d’eau. And we had no idea! Nor, obviously, did the vendors or the estate agents or they would have made a big deal of it. And possibly  more profit too!

The man himself!

I requested the Napoleonic cadastral (local area map) of Nouzerines, dated 1829, at the archives. I saw our neighbours’ properties at Montpetut and Les Guérins, but there was no Les Fragnes. There was, however, a lake. Our lake! It was land parcel no. 263. When I looked this up in a weighty register written up in 1829, I found this described as ‘Pêcherie du Frâne’. It’s not too difficult to see where ‘Fragnes’ has come from. Somewhere between now and 1829, the ‘a’ of Frâne lost its circumflex, a ‘g’ got slipped in and the whole thing became plural. I’m trying to find out what ‘frâne’ means. It’s an old word and possibly means a landslide or a subsidence, something along those lines. However, I have more homework to do here.

Alder at sunrise

André Beaufils owned this étang. Beaufils is a name I’ve come across before. In the stash of attic treasures, we found a roll of election posters. Marcel Beaufils was standing in the 1910 elections. Also, I’m pretty sure Genevieve Beaufils is written in the front of one of the schoolbooks we found, dating from the 1870s. I’m about to get very dusty digging into the past.

André Beaufils owned most of what is now Les Fragnes, although M. Parrot had a tiny bit and so did Louis Payat. Possibly François Desfausses, a surgeon in Boussac, also owned a small corner. I shall take our up-to-date cadastral with me next time I go to compare with the Napoleonic one. I’ve yet to track down how many people the land went through before it came to us, but one step at a time!

Scanning a microchipped carp

Back at my blog after an outing. Chris and I were away a whole 30 hours, our first time leaving the farm together, and our first child-free outing since Caiti was small!

We went to Mayenne, to another Angling Lines venue, Oakview Lake, run by Martin and Shirley Barker, to witness fish being microchipped.

Oakview is lovely with an island in the middle, which Chris covets!  However, it was the small stock pond that held the carp that would be chipped today.  We watched this being netted by Michel Bigot’s pisciculture team of Laurent and Emrick.

Netting the carp lake

A net is spread all round the perimeter of the lake and then slowly dragged in so that all the fish are forced into the second net, la poche, which is fixed behind this net. The poche is pulled to the bank and iron rods are put in to hold it in place. Then the fish can be lifted out for examining, sorting, chipping etc.

A team of four had come down from the UK to demonstrate the microchipping. Roy, Rich, Chris and Joanne were very organised and efficient. Roy showed us the equipment – a small ‘gun’ and rice-grain sized chip which comes premounted in a sterile needle.

The microchip

The chip is inserted about 7 cm below the dorsal fin. The needle is slipped under the skin and, keeping just below it, pushed in to its full extent and ‘fired’ twice which puts the chip in position. A dab of bonjela as anti-septic and the job is done. The chip is then read with the scanner to check it’s operational. The fish has forgotten all about the process by the time it goes back into the water!

The point of microchipping fish is for managing them – monitoring growth and health – and also for security. The process was first used for koi carp, ornamental fish, which can be very valuable and subject to theft. Smuggling happens with ordinary carp too. A 40+ lb carp is worth more than one thousand euros.

We’ll be chipping our fish in stages – and a bit later in the year. Emrick and Laurent spent a cold February morning in waders and tee-shirts netting the fish. I’m not quite up for that!

Dan Allen is the owner of Oakwood and through this Blog section he’s going to keep a diary of the daily life of a French carp lake owner.  If you have any questions for him feel free to post them at the bottom of this post.

Today I have been finishing the last application of siltex to the lake at Oakwood, a messy job but an essential one.  Siltex has many benefits for a fishery such as;

• Decreases organic and oxidisable matter which shows up as a reduction in silt levels
• Increases oxygenation and stimulates aerobic micro-organisms
• Improves water clarity by settling solids
• Reduces methane production in silt body
• Counteracts acidity in water and silt
• Provides essential calcium for pond life
• Increases biodiversity in water bodies

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This may go over most peoples heads but in short it promotes exceptional water quality and reduced silt levels.  Here at Oakwood we believe in having a scheduled fishery management programme & we plan carefully for the future to ensure we provide one of the best run and looked after fisheries around.

Steph & Chris Dagg run Notaires & Alder lakes. Through this personal Blog, Steph is going to describe her experiences of moving to France and living the dream of many UK carp anglers.

It’s easy to fall in love with a fabulous property – or at least one with a lot of potential! – when you’re house-and-lake-hunting abroad. You rush off to buy it, and it’s only later some of the practicalities start to hit home. This is particularly the case when children are involved, so here are a few things worth bearing in mind, which we didn’t when we moved here!

We arrived in France in August 2006 with our three children who were then 14, 11 and 5. We moved into two hovels which were borderline uninhabitable, with one tap, one plug and one working socket between them. We left a beautiful house in Ireland which we had built ourselves just three years earlier, thinking this was where we’d be for ever.

So why did we find ourselves at Les Fragnes, with its total lack of facilities, it’s rat skeleton in the floor, its strange piles of sand in the corner of one room and its carpet of owl pellets in the attic?

We just fell in love with Alder

Because of the lakes. Les Fragnes has three lakes, which is exactly what husband Chris was looking for when we made the decision to change our lives and move to France to run a carp fishery. I can still see the expression on his face when we went to see the largest lake of the three, the one we’ve called Alder. It was a freezing cold November day, we were halfway through an exhausting, stressful house-hunting week, and we’d seen so many hopeless venues before this one that we were starting to despair. So we knew this was something really special. The fantastic lakes made us gloss over the awfulness of the cottages and the sheer volume of the adjoining 75 acres of farmland and woodland. We’d cope. We’d sort things out.

The house was in need of a little work!

And we have done. But it wasn’t easy. The first winter was horrendous. Chris was back in Ireland working, the kids were struggling at school (more about this later), it was a very cold winter and we didn’t have central heating. We were sleeping downstairs in one cottage (the upstairs were rubbish-filled attics with more hole than roof), and eating in the other one (which had the one tap). Don’t ask where we were going to the loo! But we got through. Looking back I have to wonder how, now that we’ve got used to such luxuries as running water, a proper kitchen and central heating.

So factor in renovation time for your project, if it’s one like Les Fragnes that needs some attention. Bear in mind that while it might be bearable semi-camping in the summer, it’s a different story in winter. Very different! Start insulating the moment you step inside your house, even if it’s the middle of June. You can never have enough insulation, take it from me. continue reading…

Dan with an Oakwood beauty!

I bet if I was stood in a room with 100 carp anglers there would be 85 hands up in front of me by now. It must be most anglers dream to have there own fishery whether it be at home or abroad. It certainly was my dream as a boy to have my own carp lake many days were spent sitting on the side of rivers and lakes around the UK dreaming of the prospect.

Almost 30 years has past since then and I now find myself as the owner of the beautiful estate lake Oakwood in Brittany France. In this article my aim is to provide a glimpse of “the dream” and give a realistic insight of just how much hard work it actually is and maybe not such a dream after all!

I will start by describing the lake, it was dug in 1862 by the owners of the chateaux , I think since then it has been largely left to its own devices, to develop naturally shall we say.

Swim 1 before clearing work started

When I purchased the lake I could see the potential but I definitely under estimated the amount of work involved in getting the lake ready for commercial fishing. The best way I can describe it, is as a house that needs to be stripped right back to its shell, have the foundations looked at and start again!

This translates to having a 5 acre lake covered almost totally in lily pads and a horrendous amount of natural weed, on top of that was the removal of 150 years of debris that had fallen in such as tree limbs and even whole trees.

That’s the lake covered… then comes the surrounding land… some 19 acres of overgrown forest and 15 ft high brambles. In fact there was only access to the waterside at one place in 5 acres of water and half of the site was not even fenced, a mammoth task in itself as the land is rock hard. Then there’s the facilities to build for the anglers.

At the start I was full of energy and raring to go after spending our first night in our “new” house which resembled a building site, we had concrete floors, no heating, this was not a problem at the time as it was the start of the summer and more importantly no kitchen. My two coleman fishing stoves were employed to do the job of keeping us fed for the next few months until a kitchen could be delivered.

The first job was to clear a path around the lake my new Stihl strimmer was fired up and away I went. I think about 2 weeks passed and I had in place a small path that meandered through the woods and along by the lake. The next decision that had to be made was where to place the swims. Much thought was given to this and I set about clearing 6 pegs off the main path. The chainsaw was now also no stranger to hard work as I cut down the trees that were in the way of the pegs before bringing in the brush cutter. continue reading…