Catch - 5 Skimmers, 1 Carp
Weather - Mostly cloudy, cool south easterly
Match - Pairs Series rd 1 - 33rd out of 34.
The first round of the pairs series and I was really looking forward to it. Mark did the honours with the draw, handing me p4 and p32 on Tile for himself. Neither pegs were great, but ultimately we were only fishing for our 4 peg section.
To be honest my day didn't get any better, as in hindsight I killed my swim at the start, introducing 3 balls of groundbait and micros at 13m.
Starting on the straight lead towards the rope, didn't produce any bites regardless of what I put on the hook. A switch to the feeder resulted in a 1lb skimmer, but again no more bites.
An hour into the match and it was time for the pole and after 10mins realised I had made a mistake. Trying to be positive for the skimmers back fired, as feeding micros and 4s was the way forward. Mind you, bumping 3 skimmers didn't help my cause.
Pushing out to 14m helped a little but bites were at a premium. My section included pegs 1,3 and 5. The angler on p1 had already caught a couple of carp, Rich Coles on p3 had a couple of skimmers, as had Vic Bush on p5 and I was falling further behind.
My short line were I had fed pellet hadn't produced a single bite. There were a few carp boshing mostly on the other side of the lake, so I setup a waggler to fish half depth with 8mm pellet. On the 3rd cast I had a 6lber and thought I might be able to rescue my position. Unfortunately not, as I didn't have another bite. Out of desperation I kept firing 8s over the waggler line hoping to pull some fish into the swim, but it just didn't happen.
10lb was a miserable return for the peg. Had I been less aggressive at the start and simple fished pellet, I'm confident I would have had 15lb of skimmers as both Rich and Vic had done, and then probably nicked a couple of carp. Only 30lb won my section which turned out to be the worse section over the 2 lakes, as the rest of the complex fished really well.
Mark had a tough time from his peg which has a reputation of being poor. Fishing for pride in the next round!
If I cant catch because of the draw, then I don't tend to beat myself up, however to mess up the way I did today, well I was pretty angry with myself.
1. 99- 3 - Ben Hagg (Guru) - p11
2. 189- 7 - Tom Mangnall (Mosella) - p31
3. 144-12 - Dan White (Garbolino) - p25
4. 121- 3 - Dave Romain - p21
5. 119- 0 - Luke Pester - p10
6. 110- 9 - Keith Bilder - p20
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