It amazes me that you run a match at such a good fair venue and struggle to get any numbers of anglers fishing. Maybe they prefer venues that are peggy and the peg wins the match rather than angling skill! Anyway back to the days fishing.
As usual at the draw I got Trevor Little to pull out my peg, And I ended up on Pear Tree peg 18. It is about halfway along and in the gap between the islands.
Matt Love pulled out peg 16 next to me and he was well pleased, or maybe not.
The wind was blowing towards the gap in the islands and it would be very difficult to fish the waggler today although not impossible. The problem I had was Matt on peg 16 had a much better peg with the island closer and less wind to contend with and I was certain I couldn’t match him on the waggler as my presentation will be compromised.
That decided my tactics for the day I was going to start on the waggler for the first hour and hopefully catch a few while feeding the shallow pole line going out and emptying it. I was going to feed and have the odd look down the margin too if things were slow.
Bait was simple with plenty of 6mm pellets for feed and on the hook, with a few 8mm for hookers. I had a bit of meat and hemp to feed down the margins. Also some groundbait mixed up on the dry side.
I signalled the start of the match and dumped a pot of feed down each margin, then fed pellet out to the island followed by the waggler. As I thought the float was blowing out of position quickly only giving me a short amount of fishing time per cast. I did however manage to catch a few and with one hour gone I had 9 fish in the net. This was not good enough on the day as I know several anglers on the lake were out catching me so it was time to go out on the pole where I had been feeding for an hour.
I didn’t see any fish showing near the surface so started at about 2ft deep. It wasn’t long before the first carp was in the net; this was working well and matching the catch rate of those around me now. For the next 3 hours I caught in spells with most fish in the 1-2lb range mainly at around the 9 meter mark. As always I had to use all the tricks I know to keep catching.
With an hour of the match left I had 52 carp in the net and guessed I needed a lot more to have any chance of winning. I had come shallower to a foot deep by now and decided to step up the feed to 6-10 pellets every few seconds. This really got the carp moving and I could see several just under the surface darting about picking pellets off. I found I can watch the fish and pick off the bigger ones and I had several fish in the 3-4lb range during the last hour putting another 30 fish in the net before signalling the end!
I ended up with 82 fish for 117lb which was the best weight on my lake but word was Rusty fished a good match on Bramley with 137 carp so I doubt I would beat that. It turned out his fish were small but still managed to beat me by 8lb with 125lb to win the day.
The full result on the day is.
1st Rusty Graves B20 125-1
2nd Nick Gilbert P18 117-1
3rd Trevor Little B7 90-6
4th Matt love P16 88-10
5th Jim McDowell B5 80-14
6th Vince Gould B18 80-10
7th Jeff Driscoll P20 77-7
8th Derek Gladwin P6 71-12
9th John Haigh P4 66-0
10th Andy Silver B16 63-13
11th Jay Lay P24 60-5
12th W Miles P14 48-2
13th W Mitchell B9 38-0
14th Charlie Chawner P8 DNW
14th Mike Jamson P2 DNW
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