Angling Lines Blog

Scott Ratcliffe (Master Chef of Great Britian) @ Alder Lake gives us some tips on cooking tasty food on the bank;

1- For safety use a cooker that is low to the ground so you can’t knock it over and never cook in you bivvy.

2- The best fuel to cook on is gas, as it is easier to control the heat and burns hotter. Keep the gas in a warm place like the bottom of your sleeping bag as it will burn better if the gas is warm compared to it being cold and burning slow. continue reading…

I think most carpers will agree cooking on the bank is a pain in the proverbial… It’s bad enough, if you can’t get your car to the peg, just walking your gear round, without dealing with bags of tins, pasta & water, stoves, pans, plates, etc..

For those who have been carping a while and have read the great Rod H’s works you’ll know that the pub and the local Indian were all part and parcel of the fun and enjoyment of a good carp session. They just couldn’t miss the pub!! Or the meal afterwards no matter what water they were on.

To catch fish, you just have to be fishing in the right place at the right time, but this doesn’t necessarily mean sitting it out without a break.
So my advice for those on a carp session to France is to forget the chore of cooking and find yourself a nice little local restaurant or café. Most rural French towns and villages will have one and often a good meal will cost as little as 10 Euros. So you can quite literally eat out every day for less than a food package on a lot of lakes.

I was first introduced to this idea by Shaun Harrison when we shot the Remy video a couple of years ago. Come 11:30 am in came the rods and a group of scruffy carp anglers made themselves as presentable as possible before heading off to a local restaurant, in this case near the close by Lac d’Orient called the “L’Orée d’Orient”, which as it happens and by pure coincidence, was another haunt of Mr. Hutchinson when he was fishing at Orient. There are even photos of him on the wall. Here we were able to enjoy a reasonabley priced meal and a beer or wine in a very civilised manner.

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Bankside food while carp fishing needs to be tasty, but quick and easy to prepare. So aside the fry up what can you eat?

The main problem you get cooking on the bank is lack of space and only one or at the most two cooker rings. I’ve used a Coleman double burner in the past and these are quite good, but make a real mess of your cookware and it is hard to get a low enough heat to simmer properly without burning the food. I have also used gas with a Campingaz stove, but I’ve seen some excellent ones by Primus also. Recently I’ve started cheating by using my Westfalia Campervan wherever possible. I still only get two hotplates though, but the fridge and running water help immensely.

So which recipes do I cook on the bank? Well I hate tinned food! I see guys turn up with loads of horrendous, heart attack inducing stuff in tins. Most are full of E numbers, MSG and sugar. No, I prefer fresh food where possible, even if it means going out on a regular basis to the supermarket to stock up. These are my top five recipes while on the bank.

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Every once in a while someone comes along with a simple yet really useful product, where you think…

“Hey! That’s neat… why has no one come up with that before?”

Well the Steady Rig from Rig Innovations is just such a product.

I met these guys out on the bank carp fishing in France a few years back at one of our Angling Lines venues and they proudly showed me their invention… an adjustable base, designed to take any of the most widely used camping stoves and keep them level and safe while in use on a uneven bank.

The lads were kind enough to give me one to try.  As I travel around fishing and shooting videos for Angling Lines, I need to camp more than most. In the summer I virtually live in my small camper van.

Well here I have to be honest and say I pushed the Steady Rig away under the bench seat of my camper and pretty much forgot about it for a good few months… sorry guys!

That is until I was out on the bank one day last summer and I didn’t want to fry the steak inside the van and sink it out… but my swim was particularly steep and uneven. No matter how I tried I just couldn’t keep my stove from falling over.  I use the blue Campingaz canisters and as good and inexpensive as they are, they are tall and somewhat unstable.

‘Hang on a minute!, I thought to myself… Let’s try that invention the guys gave me and see if it really works!!… continue reading…