A few months ago, when we started to ask about a reservoir in Portugal, we looked at several fishing forums, and finally we asked in carpforum, where our friend Fran Granados and Álvaro “el Carponi” recommended us Alfarofia without hesitation. We didn’t hesitate for a second, neither my fishing partner “Isaac”, nor me, to ask for information directly to Joao Carlos, who took care of us and explained us wonderfully well the functioning of the lake, the basic rules, the material… and everything related to the fishing session. We booked for the third week of April, hoping that the carp had not spawned, and the crabs were not very active.
When we arrived at the reservoir, it was as it had been explained to us and as we had seen it so many times on Google Earth, small, narrow, full of reeds all along the shore and shallow.
The first day, we tried a bit of everything, to see if we could find the carp’s favourite baits, as the weather was quite unstable, with air, cold, numerous showers of water with a lot of wind and from time to time the sun came out, and we had to wear short sleeves, but in an instant it was raining again, in short, a crazy weather. We started to fish trying all kinds of baits, different flavoured boilies, corn, pellets, tiger nuts… and so we started to try out different fishing areas. The first night we had 2 bites, although we only managed to land one, it wasn’t until midday on Friday when we started to discard some baits, and we chose what we thought would give the best results, like changing the size of the hooks, because some bites were almost imperceptible, we also changed the size of the leaders and the colour of them, to try to make them go as unnoticed as possible, and, from then on, we started to have better results, as we didn’t stop having numerous bites, some of them very good, others a little more difficult to detect if it wasn’t for the tensioners that indicate the rear bites, as we had several, but the best of all was yet to come, as Saturday was the day we enjoyed Alfarofia the most, they didn’t stop biting all day long, and then at around 19:30 pm a rear bite indicated to us that we had a good bite: 30 h a rear bite showed us once again the presence of some that were a bit reluctant to receive our bait, and what a fish, a nice common carp of 15,200 kg, until then it was the biggest fish we had caught, so we had a photo session, and then we went to the water, but the thing did not stop there, because the postures did not stop giving us one fish after another, we did not sleep all night Saturday, because we caught a carp every hour, from 12 at night to 8 h in the morning we caught 7 carps.
At 8 o’clock in the morning we had another pleasant surprise, when we managed to catch another beautiful common of 15,860 kg, but the most ANXIOUS carp, as Isaac and I call the biggest of the fishery, had come out at 6 o’clock in the morning, it was a magnificent common of 19,260 kg, which presented a beautiful battle with Isaac in which he had to give up. The two days and three nights of fishing that we had spent were very nice, intense, full of emotions and sensations that only the good carpfishing angler knows how to understand. At the end of the session we landed another beautiful common of 12,200 kg, which was the cherry on top of the fishing. At the end of the session, we counted the catches, as we always like to know the number, the weight and the quality of the catches, and it was our surprise when we checked that we had a total of 25 bites, of which we caught 18 carp with weights between 4 and almost 20 kg, and we lost 7 pieces, 5 of them when we had to split them, as they got tangled in the bottoms of the bulrushes, and we could not get them out, so we had to cut the lines to free them.
It was a fishing session that we will surely have to repeat, although every good angler knows that no two fishing sessions are ever the same in life, but only because of the comfort of the marsh, the tranquility of being able to fish at night, baiting the waters, sounding the marsh, setting up the fishing stations, being able to eat with gas camping. …, etc. We will come back again, as all carpfishing enthusiasts like to do it, and it has been seen and proved that in this country everything related to carpfishing is synonymous with prohibition, as it seems that the laws are made by those who know the least about the subject without asking the fishermen what their needs are. That is why, from these humble letters, I would like to thank Raúl, guide of Alfarofia and above all Joao Carlos, for his kindness, availability and for making us enjoy those of us who like this so much, making his particular reservoir available for all of us to enjoy.
Thank you very much, Joao, I’m sure we will see you before the end of the year. Thank you!
