01/09/12 - Todber - Whiteposts

Weight - 133lb 12oz
Catch - 55 F1, 43 Carp, 2 Roach, 1 Rudd
Weather - Warm & sunny
Match - Open - 6th out of 14

The day after this match I should be fishing Trinity Waters, instead of writing this blog, however I woke up this morning not feeling very well so had to send Tony a text informing him of my non attendance. Unfortunately a stressful week at work, plus a long day driving took its toll, which is a shame becasue I enjoy fishing Trinity.

Back to Todber, we had the top & bottom lakes at Whiteposts. Informatiion suggested that the bottom lake would win since there was more but smaller fish, whilst the top lake had the bigger fish.

I found myself on peg 29 on the bottom lake, however there was a big question mark over the pegging of the lake, as Mark continued to remind Nick about for most the match. Instead of peg one, miss one or something similar, the middle peg, which Nick happened to draw! had 3 spare pegs one side and 2 the other side, so in other words he was pleasure fishing, so by rights should win the match. My peg was second from the end with Jon Walker on the end peg. To my right I had a spare peg before the next 2 anglers.

Following a conversation with Eddie Wynne at Tony's shop on Friday who had fished a festival there last week I had a clear plan of attack. Being a fish race I needed to catch short and the match turned out to a match of 3 parts.

I started at 7m with 8mm pellet on the deck, but after 10mins only had 1x F1 and loads of silly bites. Since that wasnt going to plan I started to catch shallow at 8m and continued to do so for the next 2hrs. The problem was the lack of carp, I only had 1, whilst Jon was also catching shallow under the end bank tree, but had carp in amongst his F1. For what ever reason the carp didnt want to come shallow in the open, prefering to stay close to cover.

In the meantime I started feeding meat down both margins and was very conscience that I was falling behind everyone and therefore needed some carp. Unfortunately the following 2hrs was just plan frustrating, becuase I only managed 8 carp down the margin, but had to go back out shallow to start catching again.

During the final 2 hours the carp decided to finally turn up down my margin and I reckon I probably put 80lb in the net, by continually swapping left and right on my top 3, but I was an hour too late. Having said that I had to pull a snag out by hand, which also seemed to improve the presentation, just a shame I didnt hook up on it eariler.

Mark won the match fishing meat at 5m, whilst Jon was 2nd on our lake all caught shallow and Nick with all that space was 3rd. If I was to fish the match again, I would dump feed at 5m instead of fishing shallow, but then again I needed my margin to turn on a little sooner.

1^st 205-15- 0 – Mark Poppleton  (meat/short - bottom lake)

2^nd 169-11- 0 – Mark Brennan (method feeder - top lake)

3^rd 164-11- 0 – Ben Bentley (top lake)

4^th 163- 8- 0 – Jon Walker (shallow/pellet - bottom lake)

5^th 152- 1- 0 – Nick Merry (bottom lake - pleasure fishing)

6^th 133-12- 0 – Ken Rayner (bottom lake)