Catch - 17 Carp, 2 F1, 15 Skimmers, 2 Roach
Weather - Warm & cloudy.
Match - Tackle Den (22 fished) - 2nd in section, 5th overall
It’s been 12 months since I last fished the Old Match Lake
and when I arrived, I saw the water level was down by over a foot and as a
consequence the match was restricted to 5hrs, rather than the normal 6hrs.
We had 22 today, so every peg was in, plus 4 on the island
of Willow, which meant it was likely to be tough going.
I drew peg 4, which was OK, and I had birthday boy Matt
Greaves on p3. On the all-in I decided to focus on paste again, starting at 14m
just feeding a few 6s in the pot and I got off to a great start catching 3 carp
in the first 3 put ins, before suffering a couple of missed bites. Setting up a
new swim a couple of metres to the right of the first, bouncing between the 2
swims helped me to keep catching for next 45 minutes.
I had been catapulting 8s between the island gap and fully expected
the tip to go round when I tried the straight lead and pellet but 9I only
hooked and lost one small carp throughout the match, so stuck with fishing the
paste.
A switch to a short line (6m) produced another run of carp,
before the skimmers arrived. To be honest, I was quite happy to stay on the
skimmers during the middle of the match, even switching to my F1 paste rigs.
However, Matt started catching down his margin earlier than expected
and I felt I needed to do the same before I fell too far behind. Unfortunately,
I could only catch small skimmers and started wasting too much time trying to
encourage carp into the margins, as they would come in but wouldn’t settle.
I decided to dump 2 cups of micros and a few 4s down the
right margin. Whilst that settled, I went back out to my 14m line and started
catching again, adding a couple more carp from the short line and 3 more from
the right margin late on.
In the end the lake fished better than expected and I
managed to pick the section by default.
1.
96-13 – Steve Venn – p7
2.
73-14 – Pete Philips – p20
3.
71- 6 –
Andy Burns – p10
4.
63- 7 –
Matt Gale – p16
5.
61-13 – Ken Rayner – p4
6.
56-14 – Simon Collins – p17