This is what Grant had to say about his trip:

“After a long, gruelling, 20 hour drive we finally arrived at Parco del Brenta in Italy. A night of resting in the hotel, until we were allowed on the complex on Sunday afternoon was much needed to recharge the batteries. If you are driving, then I can’t recommend this enough as it sorted us out ensuring we were all eager to get fishing on the Sunday.

“We had decided, when booking a year prior to the trip, to fish in pairs and choose which swims we had. This meant we could prepare and do our homework on how to fish that particular area and gain as much knowledge as we could before the trip.

“Because me and my buddy for the week were both using different baits, we had decided that we would both prefer to fish separate sides of our swim. After leading about and finding the road, which I’d learnt was used to dig out the lake. I marked out the area and planned to fish all three rods tight together fishing in around 8ft of water that was at a comfortable distance to fish. The road was appealing because either side of it, it dropped to approximately 20-23ft, kind of acting like a large gravel bar. Depending how this went I was going to roam a single rod around after a couple of days but soon found there was no need.

“After a few minor tweaks to try avoiding hooking so many cats my bait approach for the week ended up being 50kg of Krill boilies in 12 and 16mm mixed with some of the lake’s pellets they supply. This was all heavily soaked in Cloudy Krill, Pure Tuna, Krill glug, and Pure Hemp oil before finally being coated with a couple of the Pure Naturals powders and Krill powder. I ended up not having enough bait towards the end of the week and on the last night was more or less out as they simply could not get enough of it.

“I decided in advance that I would be using solid bags over the top of the mix for the week opting to double bag them and if all failed to then start experimenting with different tactics.
In the bags I went for a mixture of the Krill and Bloodworm Pellets in 2.3mm with Krill Powder as the bedding at the bottom of the bag to help construct the perfect tight bag for accurate casting. Hookbaits were wafters, I used: Signature Squid, Pineapple N -Butyric, Peach and Pepper, or Buchu-Berry. All of these hookbaits caught fish.

“I had almost 20 bags tied ready to go when I had arrived which let me maximise my fishing in those moments of madness. They just simply needed a quick injection of hemp oil and a loop to loop with the main line and the rod was straight back out on the spot within five minutes”.

“It was certainly a week to remember and a week to recover from once I was back home! It isn’t often you catch a 70-pounder, let alone two of them backed up by numerous fifties and forties!”