Canals and Carp

We headed south to the Dutch/Belgium border, just on the outskirts of Maastricht.  What a lovely city, really vibrant. Lots of young people being a University town, the place has a lovely feel to it.

The river Maas was walking distance from the site, but work was being carried out on the adjacent canal and extra water was being pumped into the river.

The levels were up and down like a spate river making fishing extremely difficult.  A pity, as it was a cracking bit of river, with lots of fast water, creases and pools.

I managed a couple of barbel on a short morning session before the sun got up and it became too hot. For me, anyway.

Goggle eyed fecker eh ?

Next morning I was up for an early morning bike ride and got chatting to a carp angler on the canal.  He said he'd not caught anything. After a while, having established I was a visitor and not a total helmet, he said, actually he had caught something.

He wasn't kidding. A 51lb carp.

I helped him lift in out for a photo. It was enormous, the biggest carp I've ever seen.

A proper wild fish, from a huge canal network. Good work. Proper carping.

The day before I'd spotted half a dozen carp feeding in a bay just off the canal. They were sending up huge silt clouds and occasionally rolling. If I'd have had time I'd have had a go for them, but you can't do everything. 

A few days later we found a nice park up just over the border in Belgium, right on the canal. As luck would have it, there was what turned out to be an absolutely fantastic little restaurant two minutes walk away. Perfect.

There were some great bike rides along the waterways, all on proper cycle paths. Plenty of anti tank turrets from WW2 along the way if you're interested in that sort of thing. 

I went in the local post office to get a fishing permit and was there for over forty five minutes. 

There was a problem with their IT system because they couldn't find "Great Britain" or "United kingdom " on it. Yes, really.

The woman rang head office and eventually agreed that the UK did exist and she could give me a permit.

We didn't catch much for a couple of days really, but had a nice time nodding about, eating, drinking, cycling and fishing.