Catch - 39 Carp, 5 Skimmers
Weather - Very hot & sunny. Light breeze.
Match - MFS website (day 2 of 2) - 6th out of 36 (2nd out of 10 - section)
Day 2 and the met office issued a heat wave weather warning, advising people to avoid the mid-day sun, although unlike yesterday at least there would a be a bit of a breeze, which would put some much needed ripple on the water. I wanted to draw the middle of pool 1, but ended up with p98 on pool 7.
Apparently I was moaning quite a bit because I really didn’t fancy the draw. Pool 7 is another 12 peg strip lake, which is parallel to pool 6 and p98 is the first peg on the lake. So another end peg, however the breeze was blowing down the lake, which meant all the ripple was down that end and flat calm in front of me.
98lb came from the peg yesterday for 3rd in section and speaking to the angler he said he caught mostly on soft pellet down the left hand bank. Mark persuaded me to take his feeder rod so at least I had another option, whilst he was quite happy with his draw in the middle of pool 6.
Yesterday, I wasn’t entirely happy with my margin swim, having feed 4 big tins of corn and hemp for only a moderate return. I decided to use baits I’m more familiar with, so settled on feeding 6s with some corn down the left hand bank, instead of hemp.
Rigs for the day were the same as yesterday, although on the shallow maggot/caster rig I changed to B911, hoping the wider gap would result in fewer hook pulls.
I started on the feeder, but after 5 casts, 2 or which caught the far bank vegetation I got bored and chucked it up the bank never to be used again. In the meantime I potted 6s and a few grains of corn 13m down the end bank and started catapulting caster hoping for some shallow fish. After Marks success with pellet yesterday I did consider going down the same route, however I still had a load of caster left and didn’t want to waste it.
During the first hour the fish just weren’t having it, although I managed to catch 4 on 8mm pellet, they just kept shying away from the pole in the flat conditions.
The next 3hrs was a case of rotating between the shallow line (maggot/caster rig) and the left hand bank which was producing fish mainly on 6mm expander, with a few on corn or 6mm JPZ. The shallow line was hard work having to really tease the fish into taking the bait. I could see a few anglers further down the lake catching and decided to keep an eye on Colin Mercer 2 anglers down, because he’s not usually far away from doing well. So far he had caught well on the feeder, but I was gradually catching him with my shallow fish.
The temperature today was 32c and a couple of times I had to run my pole though a wet cloth to cool the pole down, because it was burning my hand as I was shipping out. Fortunately with 2hrs to go there was a little more cloud cover and the sun was less intense. This coincided with my swim really coming to life with my catch rate picking up and I probably had half my overall weight in that time. In the last hour the fish were actually taking the bait properly, rather than me chasing them around the swim. Colin had suffered a bad last hour and was confident beating him, but news filtered down the anglers in the ripple had also caught well.
Colin weighed 119lb, Herbie 114lb, before Andy Day won the lake with 159lb, mostly on the pellet waggler and Rob Dickinson who came 2nd in yesterdays match weighed 137lb. In total there were 20x tons today.
Much happier now having made the most of the peg from what I thought would be a difficult draw.
1st 205- 4 – Ian Simpson – p14 (pool 1)
2nd 165- 8 – Rich Bedder – p18 (pool 1)
3rd 159-12 – Andy Day – p105 (pool 7)
4th 159- 4 – Ian Toplis – p11 (pool 1)
5th 152- 2 – Roland Lucas – p27 (pool 1)
6th 151-12 – Ken Rayner –p98 (pool 7)
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