Carp fishing at Koi 2 — three days on swim 11

Three days on swim 11 at Koi 2, a quarry lake, at the very end of October and the end of the season — by the last morning the temperature was below zero. Barbi and András arrived a day earlier and I joined them on the Thursday. They had booked the swim back in May, after our audience meetup, where Barbi caught the biggest fish of the event and liked the place enough to reserve it on the spot.

I came for one thing: my first carp over twenty kilos from this lake. It is not a new ambition — on the birthday session in 2023, on this same swim 11, I said the same thing: that I had never had a twenty-plus from here. It did not happen this time either. In three days I caught a single small koi, while beside me Barbi and András were catching well. A couple of hours after I arrived, András landed a 21.6 kg common and an eighteen alongside it — precisely the fish I had come for.

The difficulty of swim 11 is not the fishing, it is finding the fish. There are so many humps, drop-offs and plateaus in front of it that in the video I compare it to an egg carton. I worked through five spots: a five-metre hole thirty metres out, a 2.1 m plateau, the edge of the plateau at seventy metres in 3.5–4 m of water, the corner, and finally a natural passage between two humps towards the lighthouse. Not one of them produced a take.

András did the opposite: he went into the corner and close to the margin with fake corn, and that is where his fish came from. The ratio ran at roughly one carp of 14–15 kg for every two or three koi. The lesson is spelled out at the end of the video — I held on to the big-fish plan too long, and meanwhile my rigs were not where the fish were.

I worked through C1 and C2 boilie, with M1, fake corn and corked hookbaits alongside. Barbi's sixth fish shows what a change is worth: four of her six came to the strawberry bait on the right-hand rod, but the sixth came on the left, on a different bait and at a different range. For the feed I mixed a "super winner" of my own: 14, 20 and 24 mm C1 boilies soaked in lake water with sweetcorn and András's fruity liquid, one or two handfuls into the bait boat.

My godson Soma came out to join us. He ran the bait boat, played and netted fish, pulled the rigs out, and landed the second-biggest koi of his life. He stayed out of the boat because of the wind and the lack of a child-sized life jacket — that comes on the next trip, in summer.

The video closes with advice from Gergő, who runs the fishery, for colder conditions: head for the front of the lake instead, swims 3, 4, 5 or 6. The bed there is simpler — swim 5 is 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.