Readers may recall some time last year I recounted a short and sorry tale of woe in one of my Predatorials about an exploratory trip to suss out the catfish potential of the River Rhone in southern France. The trip was in fact cut short after only a couple of days due to the Rhone actually flooding whilst we were there. Although we did manage to launch the boat onto the river’s turbulent and debris-strewn waters, fishing proved to be next to impossible. However, there is nothing like actually getting out onto a fishery to suss out it’s potential even if you don’t manage to fish effectively, and we saw enough of this river during our brief stay to realise that we really couldn’t let all this information we had gathered both prior to and during this trip go to waste without a return visit in more clement times. Thus is was that this June saw us towing the boat once more to the south of France, stopping on the way down to visit one of the larger French tackle shops to buy our Carte de Vacance permits required to fish legally on the French river system. French tackle shops even sell livebaits in large tanks, eels, roach, tench etc. Even if you don’t want to buy your baits in this way though, French rivers are pretty well stocked with potential livebaits anyway and a session with a quivertip rod will probably sort this supply problem out.

As anyone who has ever travelled extensively to fish on the continent will know, no matter how much you prepare for a trip, there is always something that occurs to throw a spanner in the working of the best laid plans. Although our journey was all going rather swimmingly, as we approached the town of Arles, our final destination, the car in front of the one we were following decided to brake suddenly, the car following hit it, I managed to slam the anchors on too and came to an abrupt halt – unfortunately about five inches into that car! Although I received quite a jolt to the old operation scars no-one was hurt. Clearly someone witnessing the accident thought otherwise and soon we were surrounding by four police officers in two cars, an ambulance and even the fire brigade – at any moment I was expecting the town mayor to turn up and the local brass band! After a great deal of frantic discussion and form filling  everything was sorted out to everyone’s apparent satisfaction, and following a shake of the hands and a bout mutual Gallic shrugging, everyone went their separate ways.
 

A small catfish from the Petit Rhone comes to hand

Fortunately, although the impact had pretty extensively rearranged the front of my car, nothing mechanical had been damaged and the car was still a mover, amazingly given the impact, even the lights had escaped unscathed. Unfortunately, the boat trailer hadn’t. The front fork holding it on to the trailer had been buckled on the impact, though the boat was a little scratched with a few running repairs we managed to fix the boat securely to the trailer and carry on the few extra miles to our destination.

NASTY SURPRISE
When we did arrive there was one other nasty little surprise waiting for us in the back of the car. The impact of the accident had partially knocked off the lid of the maggots we had brought along for catching baits, despite frantically scooping and picking the escapees many more had wriggled their way into more inaccessible corners of the car. Just great, I thought, by the time we get the car back to Dover there will be so many flies buzzing around the inside we have to declare them as livestock at Customs!

We were still a bit shaken up and frankly pissed off to start fishing that evening and instead decided to look around to follow up a couple of leads concerning potential launch sites on the Petit Rhone. During our last trip we had found it necessary to launch the boat in the town of Arles itself and then motor upstream on the Grande Rhone before entering the river’s junction with the Petit Rhone. This was hardly an ideal situation.

As I have said before, whenever you visit a new venue it really does pay to do as much homework as you possibly can and use any potential source of information to find as much about your chosen venue as you possibly can. Of course, the Internet, if used intelligently is one such source, and to this end I had recently been playing around with the some software available from the Google search engine called ‘Google Earth’. This software basically allows you to view satellite images of the earth’s surface. Frankly, the quality and clarity of these images is variable to say the least – though I suspect they will improve with time. However, for some strange reason the images for most parts of the Rhone are exceptionally detailed. As a result in the comfort of my own office I was literally able to virtually ‘fly’ down the length of the river trying to spot potential launching sites along its tree lined banks. One in particular looked especially promising, and now we were on the ground, so to speak, we drove to have a look at this potential slipway. It was no more than a kilometers from the campsite and would have been an ideal place to launch the boat. Unfortunately, when we inspected it, although it was a slipway of sorts, the floods that occur regularly on this river system had steepened the banks to the extent that launching there would have required either a much lighter boat or a big four-wheel drive equipped with a winch. Even so, the concept of sussing out new waters with satellite images still has some potential.
 

The largest catfish we caught on the trip

So, it looked like we were going to have to launch from Arles after all. Which we duly did next day. Despite the fact that the campsite owner had informed us they had had hardly any rain since Christmas, the river seemed fairly high still. Although we were told this was the result of snow waters melting in the mountains, the water temperature was quite high, despite the shaky start to the trip, it all looked very promising, and we motored upstream and then into the Petit Rhone with renewed  confidence.

The Petit Rhone is a beautiful wild and overgrown river of a type rarely seen in the British Isles any more. The tree lined banks provide little direct access to the bank and once into the river it is easy to forget how close one is to civilization (albeit French civilization!) The river almost puts me in mind of that classic film Deliverance and it was easy to imagine French hillbillies, lurking shotgun in hand with malevolent intent on our persons in the undergrowth. What is most definitely lurking in the undergrowth with malevolent intent are mosquitoes. They are bad enough during the daytime but at night they can be a nightmare, which was one of the reasons we chose not to fish at night, as well as the fact that it’s illegal, obviously.

The river for much of its length varies in depths from around 12 to 20ft, occasionally there are deeper holes where back eddies and the like have carved out depth of nearly forty feet. From experience derived from other similar rivers we decided to focus our initial attentions in and around these areas, by fishing a variety of float fished and legered baits. The first ‘catfish hole’ we fished in this manner, despite looking really ‘catty’ with large snags sticking out of the water close to the deep hole, didn’t produce any takes. As we were still very much in exploration mode, after a fruitless hour or so in this swim we upped anchor and moved further downstream to another likely looking deeper area.

PRODUCTIVE
This time the swim proved to be more productive and within ten minutes of getting the baits out we experienced a couple of surprisingly tentative takes on the legered baits which were both missed. Third take, however, and I managed to connect with the culprit. There have been some reports of monstrous catfish from this river and I sruck I braced myself for the arduous tussle ahead. Unfortunately this anticipation proved to be somewhat optimistic and after a brief fight on heavy gear a small but spirited kitten of around ten pounds was brought to boatside and quickly unhooked.

A few more catfish quickly followed in the same swim, as well as a number of missed takes, but all the fish we caught from that swim were in the five to ten pound bracket. Given the reputation of this river, this seemed a trifle odd to us, and we reasoned that this particular swim may be a sort of small catfish ‘nursery’. However, several more swims were tried further down the river, and it was roughly the same story in each; a number of tentative takes and few catfish caught, but all going around five to fifteen pounds, with a small number pushing over the twenty-pound barrier.

The clonk in use

After a couple more days revisiting some of the more productive swims and new ones further down the river, this pattern continued to repeat itself. Fishing into dark didn’t prove to be especially productive either for the bigger fish. It would have been easy to have just carried on fishing in this manner; the river was after all exceptionally beautiful, and aside from the occasional barge and a small number of pleasure cruisers complete with topless female sunbathers, very little occurred to disturb the tranquility. However, we can catch catfish of this stamp no more than an hour’s drive from where we live and the trees weren’t really what we had come to see, so a change of tactics was called for.

If the big catfish wouldn’t come to us we were going to have to come to them. In an effort to explore more of the water and hopefully gain a better insight into the behaviour and location of the bigger cats, we decided to drift down the river with our baits, and use the clonk to draw the fish off the river bed.

I am sure most predator anglers will already have a vague idea of what clonking entails. Although I think it safe to say that most UK anglers – even many catfish anglers – retain a certain amount of scepticism that hitting the surface of the water with a specially shaped piece of wood will really be effective in attracting catfish to your baits and even inducing them to feed. But believe me, when carried out in the correct manner, it is an astonishingly effective way of raising catfish to your baits.

WOOMPH!
It is difficult to describe in print the actual process of clonking or even the sound it makes when you are doing it correctly. Really, it’s all about practice, the more you do the better you get. I can just about achieve an acceptably resonant sound from the clonk, but Geoff has really developed his clonking style to a level that is probably on a par with most seasoned continental professionals. The sound you should be aiming for is a deep resonant ‘whoomping’ noise, once heard it’s so characteristic as to be never forgotten.

The other important point about clonking, which I feel has been lost on many UK anglers, is that you really do need to present your bait directly under the source of the sound. They really do home in on the noise and any baits presented away from the source the clonk, at the other side of the boat for instance, will not get nearly as many hits as those close to the noise.

A good fish finder is also a really essential piece of kit for clonking. By positioning the baits in the beam of the transducer so that they appear as a thin continuous line, not only can you see at exactly what depth your bait is running, you can also see catfish moving up in the water to intercept the baits! This makes clonking one of the most absorbing and exciting methods in modern predator fishing.

This certainly proved to be the case as we started to drift and clonk our way down various sections of the Petit Rhone. In fact, no less than five minutes after starting we could see on the finder’s screen the unmistakable sight of the catfish rising from an apparently barren river bed and start to follow the track of the baits. A few more applications of the clonk followed by a pause and the shape on the screen rose higher in the water, a couple more clonks and the shape moved until it almost appeared to be touching one of the baits. Geoff said “Any minute now and we’ll get a take”. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the baitrunner on one of the reels sprang into life as the following catfish snaffled the bait and took it back into deep water – all of which could still be seen on the finder’s screen. However, a strike met with no resistance the cat can quickly let go of the bait.

This is one of the main drawbacks of clonking. Basically you are raising fish that are not really in a feeding mood. In fact, the first day we tried the clonk on the Petit Rhone we had between forty or fifty takes, yet only managed to connect with four or five catfish. Now catching four or five cats on a big French river isn’t bad going - at least if they are a decent size. Unfortunately, we were once again hitting fish in the five to 15lb bracket.

MUPPET SHOW
We obviously couldn’t do anything about catching fish this small and we hoped at some point in our journey down the river we would picked up some more substantial pussies. However, we both felt we could do something about the poor takes to hits ratio, and once again a bit of prior research was to came to our rescue. We had found out that one bait local French anglers used quite extensively when clonking is a variation of those squid-like soft plastic ‘muppets’ so beloved of sea anglers in the UK. This muppet has an internal weight fitted of around two ounces, at the end of which is a large treble hook which in use is liberally draped with fat juicy lobworms. This is then hung over the side of the boat between three and ten feet deep, depending on the depth of water being fished. To a UK angler’s eyes this set up does seem a somewhat unlikely combination, and I must admit that as we lowered our own versions of this rig over the side of the boat we were both a bit sceptical.

We should have known better. Although the next catfish to be raised to the clonk went for the livebait, which true to form was promptly missed. However, the next take a few moments after hit the muppet with such a force that the catfish was hooked immediately. Unfortunately it was another kitten of about ten pounds, but at least the muppets had proved their worth. We continued to experience a few more takes on the Petit Rhone using a combination of the clonk and anchoring up close to likely looking areas. Although we didn’t get quite so many hits on the muppet/lobworm combination, when they fell to this rig they usually hooked themselves, easy to understand with that large 2/0 treble on the rig.

In order to try and find a bigger stamp of fish, we decided to move out into the main river – the Grand Rhone an apt name for a huge and at times treacherous expanse of water. The first areas we tried proved to be a failure, simply due to the strong flow we encountered which meant that it was simply impossible to anchor and drifting at about six or seven miles an hour isn’t really practical in out experience.

However, moving further afield we found areas of the river which broadened out with a substantially reduce flow. And here again we started to drift and clonk. About half an hour after starting another violent take on the muppet connected with something more solid and after a decent fight in the still strong current Geoff landed a fish of 48lb, which was at least getting somewhere closer to our target.

Quite what was attracting the catfish to take this rig was an interesting question, was it the muppet, the wriggling lobworms or a combination of the two? Although it probably was a bit of both, I suspect the lobworms were the most important part of the attraction. Certainly, when we had run out of our supply of lobworms, the muppets on their own didn’t produce anything like the same number of takes. I know some French anglers actually abandon the muppet altogether and simply fish the method with a load of lobworms on a treble. Still others successfully use strips of squid on the hookpoints, which tends to suggest smell is a factor in the attraction of these baits.
 

A fast flowing section of the Rhone

I would like to say that now we had cracked the methods and techniques we started to catch a much bigger stamp of fish. They are there, I know, I’ve seen the photos! Unfortunately this was not to be the case, we continued to work hard on the river in the searing heat, but the only result was more dropped takes and a series of small catfish. We possibly may have bumped off a couple of larger fish, but with hindsight this might only have been wishful thinking.

Where, we asked ourselves, were the other catfish boats on the river – probably on the Ebro with everyone else might have been the unpalateable answer! I know from experience that anglers who have done the Ebro ‘thing’ tend to look at you as if you are puddled when you mention going to catfish any other waters in Europe. On the evidence of this latest showing, they might be correct.

However, I’ve always tended to have a bit of a wayward side to my fishing, when things become predictable I start hankering for new waters and new techniques to try, new challenges to face and all that crap! Frankly, it’s an approach that has cost me many big fish over the years, but I like to think that this has more than been made up by the acquisition of experience and experiences. If I wanted to be on a production line I would go and work in a factory.

So, after this latest partial success, would I go back to the Rhone again, given the fact that there seems to have been a population explosion of small cats on the parts of the river we fished? Hmm, I dunno. I think I would have to acquire some more definite information about bigger fish on the river before I mounted another assault on this particular waterway. Back to the drawing board I suppose...

This article was originally published in Pike and Predators