Angling Lines Blog

I am thinking about buying a property with three lakes in the Mont De Blond area of France. The current owner says that it’s French law that the lakes have to be cleaned at a cost of 20,000 euros before he can sell the property.

Can you confirm if this is the case and how often would I as the purchaser be required to have the lakes cleaned?

Regards, James

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Hi James,

I have never come across such a law. Please don’t assume this means that it’s not true though as French law can be complicated and rules can be different in each Department.

I suggest that your best course of action would be to make an appointment with your local water police (La Police de L’eau). They are part of the Department of Agriculture and can normally be found at the Prefecture.

Find out if the lakes are registered, whether they are considered open or closed waters and what category they are classed as. You could ask your Notaire to do this for you but don’t sign any Compromis until you are 100% sure how the rules will affect these particular lakes.

Whether you get the information yourself or via the Notaire, make sure it’s in writing from the Department and that you understand it fully.

Hope that this helps, Martin, Oakview

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…

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…

David writes;

Here at the Angling Lines office we get lots of potential lake owners come to us for advice as they consider the pro’s & con’s of fulfilling every carp anglers dream – buying their own carp lake.  We’re always happy to advise based on our 10 years experience in marketing carp venues… but we lack that real first hand experience of actually going through the process.  So I’ve asked our lake owners if they’ll share their experiences of what it’s really like to both buy & then run a French carp venue.  No doubt they’ll all have common themes but I’m sure they’ll also all have had different experiences as they’ve navigated their way to their own piece of paradise.  I’ll add them over the next few weeks.  Here’s the first from Martin & Shirley Barker at Oakview.

Oakview

Whether you are looking to buy, or whether you run a carp venue already, here’s some useful tips we’ve gleaned from our experience;

Get Officially Registered!

Lakes in France must be registered with the Department of Agriculture and fall into fishing categories (categorie piscicole). continue reading…