Weight –18lb 4oz
Catch – 52 Roach, 6 Bream, 3 Perch, 1 Rudd
Weather – Mild, mostly cloudy and windy
The penultimate weekend of revision, meant no fishing, however with a match at Peatmoor Lagoon, Mark & I decided we needed a practice session to at least get an idea of the venue, since neither of us had seen the place.
What little information we managed to glean, skimmers, roach and a few tench would be the target, the lake is on the west side of Swindon and controlled by Peatmoor AC.
Mark & I had arranged to meet at Cotswold Angling for 8.30, but my sat nav sent me down a dead end road, whilst Marks sat nav sent him to another area of town on the other side of the dead end. After much swearing, about crap sat navs and never wanted to come to Swindon again, Mark finally arrived at the tackle shop.
Having spoken to Cotswold Angling last week, Mark was told we could get tickets there. On arrival it transpired they only sold season tickets and Hinders sold the day tickets, because the controlling club only allow 5 day tickets a day to be sold. Great another trip around Swindon. Cotswold gave us the postcode, which resulted in another dead end! A call to Hinders got the correct postcode, which was ½ mile away. Fortunately getting to the lake happened without further incident.
Our match on Saturday would be between pegs 1 & 27, which would put us on the south bank of the lake. I settled on peg 19, whilst Mark was on peg 22. The one thing we did notice was how tight the pegs where, fortunately there are only 16 booked in for Saturday, so at least we would have some room. The lake itself offered plenty of water and was about 4-5ft deep.
Mark & I had traded many e-mails (mostly when we were supposed to be working!) about how to approach the venue. Mark was in favour of the pellet approach, whilst I was felt that worm & caster would be better, purely because at this time of year the fishing can be a bit iffy, as the fish prepare to spawn, so I just felt we needed to cover all options. The other thing that we wanted to establish was whether we could catch on the pole, since most recent weights had come on the feeder, which I would prefer not to use.
Groundbait, chopped worm, caster and micros were deposited at 13m. I also started to catapult small balls of groundbait over the “feeder line” and I started at 5m feeding caster. After 30mins I had 20 small roach, mostly caught on red maggot. Mark had caught a 1½lb skimmer on the feeder.
I had set up a big waggler to fish over the feeder line, although I caught a roach 1st cast, the wind was proving a bit troublesome, creating quite a bit of tow and since I hadn’t set up a feeder decided to concentrate on the pole.
After letting the 13m line settle for an hour, I started toss potting a caster, chopped worm & micro mix every put in, after a few roach, I decided to use a bigger toss pot every other put in. This definitely helped and I caught my first bream, at nearly 4lb on double red maggot. My rig was a jean François 0.4g, but with the increasing wind the tow was getting worse and my presentation was suffering.
At times like this I always remember a fishing lesson I got from Nicky Collins at Viaduct, fishing a cold winter league match on Lodge Lake. The first half of the match I was ahead with a few skimmers, but the wind got stronger, Nicky switched to a heavier rig and in the 2nd half of the match he doubled my weight, simply because I persisted with the same rig, which was now rendered useless by the wind.
So a new rig was soon set up with a polar ice 1g. The difference was very noticeable, the float sat better in the water and another big toss pot of food, resulted in another bream. For about 45mins I caught regularly, including a big perch. Worm was the best bait. When the swim died, I switched back to the inside line and caught more roach.
We were about 3hrs into our session and Mark was struggling. His pellet line hadn’t produced, the feeder only resulted in 1 skimmer and the only fish he could catch over his chopped worm were roach, although he had some quality specimens. Having seen my success with the heavier rig, he finally relented, after must moaning, about “this aint very good” and “not sure I want to fish on Saturday”. Anyway the next 2hrs on his heavy rig, he couldn’t stop catching over his pellet line, including quality bream and a 3-4lb tench. Funnily enough he was now interested!
My pole line had pretty much died, so decided on a pellet dump at 15m, before switching back to the inside line when I had a really good run of fish on caster. Back out on at 15m I did catch a big bream on pellet, but no other fish.
Mark finished with 38lb, so those last 2 hours were very productive and in many ways threw the ideas we were beginning to formulate out the window. All in all it was very useful practice and we have both came to the same conclusion in the way we plan to attack the match.
So we will see on Saturday whether we got it right.
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