Vantastic Lukas: Unexpected things often happen

Unexpected things often happen

After Alice and I said goodbye to the lake in Extremadura, we slowly headed towards the airport in Madrid. She accompanied me on my fishing trip and my domestic travel for a week. On the way we made a night stop at an idyllic river and then started the rest of the way to Madrid the next day. However, on the way to the airport, some unexpected complications arose that threw the rest of the plan into disarray. When the navigation system corrected the arrival time closer and closer to the departure time due to an accident, we became a little uneasy. I stepped on the gas hard to stay within the time window. But when two police officers guided me off the highway on their motorcycles, we almost gave up hope of catching the flight. The reason for the police stop was a missing sign that I would have to mount on my bike rack. I quickly paid the fine to continue heading towards the airport. At some point we gave up our last hope and had to realize that Alice wouldn't get the flight.

So now it was time to change plans.

Change of plan

Since Alice was feeling sick anyway, she decided to stay a few days longer and fly out a little later. Since I wanted to avoid unnecessary driving around due to the high fuel prices, I decided against my original plan to head back to Extremadura. Finally, a few days later I would have to drive Alice again to the airport in Madrid.
Instead, I picked a lake on the map that wasn't too far from Madrid. The weather forecast for the next few days looked terrible: daytime temperatures around 10 degrees, plus rain and wind. At this point I received news of the most wonderful spring weather in Germany. Great, but whatever, we had to make the best of it!

The picturesque mountain lake

On the way to the targeted lake we filled up our provisions and filled up the van's diesel and water tanks. The landscape around Madrid was more beautiful than I expected and so a little later I maneuvered my vehicle down the rocky slope towards the lakeshore. In front of us was a crystal clear, turquoise lake surrounded by a beautiful mountain silhouette. Against this picturesque backdrop, the previously fished Orellana was just dull and bare. Once again a sign for me of how much one allows oneself to be influenced by the greed for big fish and the hype about special waters. Mostly at the expense of one's own spirit of discovery, one's own freedom and the beauty of nature. “Who wants to sit down in a huge, new body of water where there is no angler in sight, without any information about whether there is even a carp swimming around there?” Instead, it's better to sit down in a row with other cerebral anglers on a less beautiful body of water, only to end up becoming enemies with your fishing colleagues because you caught a bigger fish than the other. I can't free myself from it either, but I've noticed how my focus has shifted more and more in recent years and I've become more of an "discoverer" than a "big fish hunter".

Barbel Eldorado

In this case, however, I had the information that there would be no really big mirror fish in the lake, but there would be some very nice ones. I quickly got my boat off the roof of the car and took my first lap across the lake with the depth sounder. The bank in our area was rocky with sharply sloping edges. So it was clear that I was looking for my spots near the shore. The visibility depth of around four meters helped me find the first spot for my rod in a weed-free area. I lowered the other two assemblies - between 8 and 10 meters. The water temperature of 10 degrees was almost 5 degrees colder than at Orellana, so I assumed the fish were significantly deeper. Anyway, the lake seemed to me to have a rather low fish population and not the ideal habitat for carp. With low expectations, I put the rods on the spots in the bay that was next to us. On the first night I heard a constant sound that woke me from a deep sleep. I drilled the fish from the bank and shortly afterwards netted a fish. A few hours later, still in the dark, a barbel bit on another rod. Over the next three days, the lake turned out to be a real barbel Eldorado. A situation that reminded me of the reservoirs in Portugal, where I had an enormous amount of barbel as bycatch. Some of them were capital and made runs that could be mistaken for that of a carp. In addition to several barbel, I was able to catch two more carp. Among them was one of the distinctively scaled mirrors, which I was really happy about.
After three days we packed up so that we could catch the plane in Madrid this time.

The journey continues alone

From there my journey continued alone. An unusual feeling after being in the constant company of other travelers all winter. However, I was long overdue for some rest and time for myself to work on my laptop again, among other things. While I park on the banks of a large, crystal-clear opencast mine just before the Spanish Pyrenees, I use the time to hit the keyboard again and write a blog.