Weights - 100lb 10oz (26lb 6oz)
Catch - 13 Carp, 18 Skimmers, 11 Tench, 4 Roach 1 Perch
Weather - Warm & sunny.
Match - Open - 2nd out of 40 - silvers (11th overall)
After 2 weeks off I was looking forward to getting back, with today being the first of 3 days fishing. Into the coffee tin of dreams I was hoping for a day on Campbell, having avoided the lake in my last 6 visits. I was also hoping for a day on the silvers to see whether I could qualify for the silvers all winners and p123 ticked both boxes.
On arrival there was loads of carp in the margins with other things on their mind and I was quite happy with my decision to fish for silvers. For company I had hopefully a future gold medallist in Rio, James Guy on p124 and Dave White on p121, however I needed to keep a close eye on silvers specialist Nigel Bartlett on p125.
Since I wanted to focus on silvers I didn't bother with any shallow rigs, but did set up a pellet rig for skimmers and 2 margin rigs, 1 for worm/caster and a stronger rig to fish meat.
On the all-in some 4s was feed at 6m and caster down each margin at 4m. I decided to start down the left hand margin 13m towards the corner, feeding a toss pot of meat and hemp. The float hadn't settled and the elastic was being ripped out. 30mins later I had 4 carp and a tench in the net, before the fish spooked.
First drop in on 6m produced a big skimmer and I thought happy days here we go. Unfortunately it didn't. I kept the 6m topped up but only caught small skimmers. Despite trying soft pellet, hard pellet and worms, buy just couldn't string any fish together. I did set up another pellet line at 14m, which only produced one small skimmer. They just didn't want to feed and I ended up spending most of my time fishing down the margins.
I had a couple more carp at 13m down the left hand margin on meat, but bites were becoming hard to come by. Dave who could see the whole lake thought I was keeping pace with the front runners, which would have created a bit of problem for me because I wanted to focus on the silvers, however Nigel was catching a lot of tench down his margins and it was unlikely I would win, so decided to just to keep the bites coming.
There was plenty of fish down my 4m margin swims, particularly to my left, unfortunately they were mostly spawning carp. However by fishing half a worm over caster/hemp I was catching small skimmers with the occasional carp, but no tench. I actually think I over fed the swims because I couldn't get a proper bite and stopped feeding for 15mins whilst I fished my other swims. When I dropped back decided to only feed caster, which worked much better, catching a couple more carp, but more importantly I had a run of tench up to 3lb which brought me closer to the target weight of 20/25lb which I thought would be good enough to frame for the silvers. I think it also helped that the carp activity had reduced during the afternoon.
The last hour was a bit of anti-climax, as I struggled for bites and I was left wondering whether I should have focused on the carp instead of the silvers. As it turned out I had done the right thing by staying on the silvers, but I was no where near Nigel who had 27 tench in his 67lb.
1st 188- 2 - Ian Dunlop - p135
2nd 158- 7 - Calum Craig - p128
3rd 140- 1 - Paul Cunliffe - p110
4th 128-10 - Chris Cameron - p112
5th 127- 4 - Glen Bailey - p116
6th 117- 1 - Allan Oram - p80
Silvers
1st 67- 6 - Nigel Bartlett - p125
2nd 26- 6 - Ken Rayner - p123
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