07/07/11 - Rood Ashton

Weight – 45lb 13oz
Catch – 16 Carp
Weather – Sunny, cloudy periods. Variable wind and cool.
Match – Wiltshire Angling Evening Open – 4th out of 6

There is certainly a fine line between failure and success, and occasionally fate isn’t in your hands. My poor run of match results continues and it’s certainly one of my worse runs, however I am confident it will end, although it will be nice to get a result which didn’t require too much effort.

Only 6 turned up tonight. It appears those early matches which attracted 17 anglers many have dropped out as it became obvious who would pick up. So rather than work out what works and compete, they would prefer to stay at home in front of the telly saying the venue is crap.

Anyway back to tonight’s match. For the 3rd match I found myself on peg 2 and I had Mark next to me for the 3rd match. Also Tony Gilbert found himself on the best margin peg – again, whilst Gary Etheridge was on the other.

Tonight I decided to bring a pellet waggler, because on previous matches there was a lot fish boshing out in the middle of the lake. I started on paste at 13m and within 10mins had 2 decent carp, but as I kept the 6mms going in, the fish seemed to back off and bites stopped.

In the meantime I was pinging 8mm’s at distance. As the match progressed I spent more time on the pellet waggler and started to catch, but only when there was a decent ripple. This prompted Mark to say I was going to win, but I could see that Gary was catching and the fish I was catching were a smaller stamp.

Going into the final hour, the wind dropped and the ripple all but disappeared and I struggled to keep the fish coming. My margin failed to produce (for the 3rd match and the regulars confirmed it is a poor margin peg) and the 13m line was still a struggle. In fact the fish didn’t seem to want the paste tonight, because I would get what looked like a proper bite, but no fish. Mark was suffering with the same problem. Gary caught on pellet, whilst Tony who had struggled, until the last hour when his margin finally came good and he caught some proper fish on meat.

Unfortunately the smaller stamp of fish, combined with the drop in the wind counted against me. I had 12 carp on the waggler, which prompted a few questions from Tony and Gary. Normally 16 carp would be worth 55lb, but I had some proper “squeakers”.

1st 88-8 Tony Gilbert
2nd 69-8 Gary Etheridge
3rd 51-0 Mark Poppleton
4th 45-13 Ken Rayner
5th 41-0 Steve Martin
6th 23-0 Terry Fell