Kristof Cuderman: Our Return to Lake Pelagicevo

Kristof Cuderman and his mate Srečko Karadžić have just returned from their annual pilgrimage to the Bosnian carp fishing mecca – Lake Pelagicevo. Here’s how the pair faired over the course of their week-long session…

Kristof says:

Traditionally for couple of years now I’ve made the journey to Lake Pelagicevo in Bosnia. This time my mate Srecko joined me on the trip.

Last winter I helped stock the lake with some young carp with a lot of potential for growing big. The average stamp of these new carp was 16kg and most of the fish we banked during this trip were these new stockies which was great to see. It was amazing to see them in such a great condition and some of them were already 2kg up from December!

One of the carp that was stock into the lake by Kristof last year

For sure I need to mention weather conditions. During the first 3 days the temps went completely crazy and we even had a high of 32 degrees. This meant that the water temperature on the surface was also high at a massive 23 degrees which, was is 8 degrees more than we normally have on here in the middle of April.

However, in the middle of the week we had a crazy and rapid drop in temperature from 32 to 7 degrees in just one day and the water temperature dropped to 16 degrees in 2 days! It was really difficult to believe but just goes to show how quickly the weather can change and effect things…or so we thought.

Conditions went from hot a sunny to freezing in a matter of hours!

What really surprised me this time is that the temperature drop didn’t change our crazy good fishing session! We were both very apprehensive about how the fishing would be effected but thankfully the carp continued to feed confidently up until our last day.

Overall we managed to catch 75 carp between us which is not normal for Pelagicevo Lake with the biggest carp measuring 28.8 kg on the scales. We also had 14 carp over 20kg barrier – insane fishing!