24/01/10 - Lands End - Match Lake

Weight – 5lb 7oz
Catch – 23 Roach, 4 Skimmers
Weather – Frosty & foggy. Later bright & breezy.
Water Temp – 5.5c > 5.5c
Match – Winter League - 36th overall, 4th section.

Another cold start and scrapping ice off the car windscreen, but fortunately the lakes only had a bit of cat ice

After 2 cancelled rounds due to the weather it was good to get the series started again and I was looking forward to getting good points. Ideally I wanted to avoid drawing the bottom end of match lake, which has been fishing terrible, so peg 22 wasn't great. The usual suspects described it as a flyer, but looking at past results showed it hasn't produced much recently, in fact reviewing last years winter league it was the worse performing peg on the lake. Dale did manage nearly 11lb of skimmers yesterday from peg 23, so felt I could at least target these and just hope a carp turns up.

After an hour the writing was on the wall. Adrian on 24 and Mark on peg 1 hadn't a bite. All I could muster was a few small roach, whilst Tom on peg 21, Mike on 19 and Dale on 18 had all caught carp or decent silvers.

I managed 2 skimmers on pellet, but I had to go as a far as I dare towards Toms peg. I caught very little to my right over my pellet swim and only small roach came from my caster swim. I could have stuck with the roach, but I needed another 10lb, simply to gain another point, so I spent more time on pellet, hoping for a skimmer or a carp without any luck. As the wind picked up I changed to heavier 4x18 float, but this didn't improve matters.

With 2 hours to go I had to try something different, so started flicking 4mm pellet to my left to try and draw some carp from Toms swim, but that didn't work either.

Very disappointed with the result, but I genuinely don't know how I could have done better. Adrian finished the match not getting a bite, whilst Mark only caught in the last hour. This end of the lake simply seems to be devoid of fish. I'm not sure whether the bright conditions put the skimmers off feeding properly, but Dale on 18 had the best silvers weight with 10-13, made up of mostly F1's and only 1 skimmer. Yesterday the reverse was true.

The only good thing to come out of today was a section pick up after a triple default! Tom won our lake with 30-11, whilst Mike was 2nd with 29-1. Sydney's was the lake to be though with 4 out of the top 6 coming from there, whilst Vince Shipp won the match from peg 62 on Johns lake. The next round is in 3 weeks and hopefully the worse of the weather will be behind us.

As a footnote, a couple of you have commented that my blog is always late. Suffering from dyslexia means I need to take care when blogging, otherwise the grammar will be worse than Tony's - lol