Weight – 13lb 12oz
Catch – 12 Roach, 11 Bream
Weather – Warm, sunny & flat calm.
Water temp – 16.0c > 16.5c
Match – Veals Winter League – rd 1 (20th overall, 3rd in section)
15 teams of 4 and most people wanted to draw Woodlands Lake, which is the carp lake.
Personally I fancied an open water draw on Wildmarsh Lake, which had 3 sections of the 4 sections. At the draw my wish was granted and I found myself on peg 30, which was on the end of spit and I had loads of water to attack. I really fancied myself to get good points.
As the match organiser I had to put the time of the match back ½ hour, due to some confusion regarding the pegging, unfortunately a couple of people didn’t understand the pegging.
At the start of the match, the real concern was the weather. It was bright & very calm, so I decided on a cautious approach and only cupped in 1 ball of groundbait, plus a little bit of chopped worm & caster at 13m. I also feed some 6mm expanders and small balls of groundbait at 25m, anticipating that I would catch most of my fish on the waggler, particularly after Wednesdays practice session.
Initially I tried to catch short for some early roach & rudd, but one had 1 bite after 15mins, so I quickly switched to the long pole. I had set up 2 rigs to fish this line. 1 light rig with .10 bottom and size 20 silverfish hook to fish caster & maggot, plus a heavy rig with .11 bottom and a size 18 B911 to fish worm & double maggot.
As the match progressed I caught most of my fish on the light rig with single caster, a few on the heavy rig & worm. I periodically tried the waggler, but only caught 1 skimmer, which was a real surprise.
With 90 mins left, I knew I was doing well, the only anglers I could see catching were Des Shipp on the far bank and Dave Downton to my right. However my swim seemed to have dried up. I tried going to 14m without any real success. I didn’t want to kill my 13m swim completely, so I decided dump a full cup of maggot, caster & chopped worm at 13m at 2 o’clock, hoping to catch a few eels.
20 mins later, 1st drop in with double maggot, the float just kept going under and I caught a biggest fish of the day, a 2½lb skimmer. In fact the last hour I managed another 4 skimmers from both my pole swims and was really confident of good points.
In the end I was 3rd in my section, beaten my anglers who both had single carp to go with their silvers weight. I did try for carp down the margins, but never had a bite and I didn’t waste too much time looking, since there was very few carp being caught on Wildmarsh. All the carp weights came from Woodlands, with the best weight being 61lb.
As well as coming 3rd in my section I was also 3rd in the silvers.
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