Koi 2 Lake

Koi 2 is a quarry lake, and we have filmed ten videos here — several of them in winter, around freezing, and once the lake froze over on us.

The lake uses numbered swims; 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 11 appear in our videos, and their character differs noticeably. Swim 11 is the sought-after one: at our audience meetup it had to be won in the draw, because plenty of people wanted it. Swim 4 is the one we joke that “nothing ever happens” at — when in truth it is one of the best swims on the lake, and several matches have been won from it.

Three of our sessions take place on swim 11 — one in spring, a birthday session in October with Tibike, and one at the end of autumn. All three ran over several days, and all three come to the same conclusion: the hard part here is not catching but locating the bigger fish. There are so many humps, drop-offs and plateaus in front of the swim that it is best described as an egg carton. The spread is telling: of our two autumn sessions there, one produced fish of ten to fifteen kilos one after another, while on the other I had a single small koi in three days — though my companions were catching well at the time. On that late-autumn session I worked through five spots, specifically hoping for a big fish — a five-metre hole at thirty metres, a 2.1 m plateau, the edge of that plateau at seventy metres in 3.5–4 m of water, the corner, and a natural passage between two humps — and open water produced not a single take. The fish were in the corner and along the margin. On the birthday session we split the three flavours by spot: M1 in the far corner, C2 in the middle, sweet C1 in the nearer corner.

Koi is also a bit of a bogey lake for me. On the birthday session I said that I had never caught a fish over twenty kilos from here, and after three days at the end of autumn I still cannot say otherwise.

The bed is characteristically broken up, with a shallow plateau and a drop-off at several of the swims. On one of our sessions the fish sat exactly in such a break, and the catch turned on whether a cast landed there. There are reeds along the bank, and at high water they can influence how fish move: at swim 7 they travel along the margin, around the reeds.

For size, our videos also feature carp over twenty kilos, with 20+ fish coming from swims 2, 3, 4 and 11, and we have filmed a 25 kg fish here too. There are plenty of koi as well: in late autumn the ratio ran at roughly one carp of 14–15 kg for every two or three koi. The lake also holds grass carp, some of them a good size — a 17 kg one came out on the birthday session. Bait is a C1 or C2 boilie and an 18–24 mm wafter on a D-rig; in autumn fake corn fished in the margin was the most effective.

The lake fishes in winter too: our December and near-freezing sessions both produced, which is not a given on a quarry lake. Gergő, who runs the fishery, advises heading for the front of the lake in colder weather — swims 3, 4, 5 or 6: the bed there is simpler, swim 5 being essentially billiard-table flat, the features run along the opposite bank, and there is far less to work out about where to put a rig. Matches are also held here, with swims drawn by lot.