Weight – 19lb 13oz
Catch – 10 Roach, 3 Carp, 2 Perch, 1 Skimmer
Weather – Mild! Bright & sunny, but breezy.
Water Temp – 7.5c > 7.5c
Match – Lands End Winter League – rd 7 - 28th overall, 10th on lake, 5th in section
Having put myself in a good position with 2 matches to go, a decent draw was required to consolidate my place in the league. With many of the poor pegs already drawn I was pleased to find myself on peg 55, however on arrival I was concerned. Yes it was sheltered from the worst of the wind, but with the recent milder weather I felt the fish may have followed the wind down to the other end of the lake.
Everyone expected Tony Rixon to win our section from peg 42 (which he did with 69lb), but the good news for me was my closest rivals hadn’t drawn well with Matt Tomes on 51, Anton Page on 50 and Martin Pettifer on 65.
On the all in a small amount of micros and caster went in at 14m by the cage and I started catapulting 4mm’s towards the point of the island opposite peg 54. A 10 minutes look around on corn didn’t produce and neither did soft pellet. ½ hour gone and every in my section had a carp and Bela Bakos opposite on 58 (not in my section) had 2.
Double maggot over my 14m line at least produced a fish, even if it was a 1oz roach, as did the next put in. With no carp showing, I decided to start feeding micros & caster via a toss pot to create some further activity with the roach and hopefully pull in a carp. My 6th roach turned out to be a carp, so success. Another soon followed before the roach returned. A quick look towards the point of the island produced another carp and I was now back in the running.
Without any further signs of carp, I started to ring the changes, by swapping to a heavier 0.5g rig to improve presentation in the troublesome wind. I also tried fishing in the open water, which I had fed lightly and an early look down the margins were I fed caster, but nothing was working.
The swim seemed to be full of tiny roach, which is never a good sign that carp are around. In the end I dumped a full big pot of food to try and feed the little buggers off, but that just seemed to encourage them even more!
The point of the island was my banker swim for the last couple of hours. I had kept the 4mms going in from the start and fully expected the carp to eventually turn up, but with 45mins to go 1 lost a foul hooker at the net was all I had.
Come the all out, I was really disappointed, because I knew there was a chance of falling out of the top 7. Anton struggled from peg 50, but Matt had done well from peg 51 with 30lb, including 9lb of skimmers to claim 4pts. Martin Pettifer had also done well for claim 3pts from probably the worst peg on the lake. Fortunately I had only dropped to 6th but with 4 of us on 30pts it is still very open from 3rd downwards.
Looking at past results, 55 has been a very hit & miss during the series. The carp are either there or not and I obviously caught it on a wrong day. With the wind blowing towards him, Bela on 58 had 6 carp for 28lb and 4pts, so there were a few carp around, but they wanted to be in the ripple. Bela was a little unhappy, because he could see carp under on the surface by the outlet pipe. Further investigation revealed floating caster & maggot that had come down the pipe from Sydney’s!
On reflection could I have done better? I approached the peg positively, expecting to catch carp, however had I taken a leaf out of Mr Nicholls book and targeted the roach properly, a further 5-10lb may have been possible and at least another point.
Something that has come to light is anglers not weighing in, unfortunately someone did tip back, which provided 1 of the top 10 with an extra point. I don’t think anyone would be happy to miss out on a pay out simply because someone else got an undeserved extra point.
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