03/09/22 - Ivy House - Old Match Lake

Weight - 92lb 6oz (10lb 2oz - silvers)

Catch - 19 Carp, 12 Skimmers, 2 Roach, 1 Crucian

Weather - Sunny, with cloudy periods.

Match - Open (23 fished) - 4th overall

Todays match was spread over Old Match Lake and Kingfisher and I drew p8 on Old Match. A good peg and hopefully a good day ahead.

Unfortunately, the first 2 hours were particularly slow. I only had 1 small carp and a skimmer on a small method to the island. Ideally, I would have liked to be able to ping pellet to the island, but with a slight head wind my 6mm pellet couldn’t reach. I tried fishing on the deck with banded pellet at 16m as well and then fishing shallow but I didn’t catch on either and to be honest I wasted time trying to work out what was working.

The best swim was at 6m fishing corn where I caught a few carp and skimmers. I also caught a few more carp on 6mm pellet at the bottom of the near shelf 6m to my left, but strangely not to my right.

At the halfway point I probably had about 25lb and was a long way behind Smiffy to my left on p7 catching short on corn and Phil on p10 catching on the straight lead over pinged pellet to the island. For the 2^nd half of the match, I decided to concentrate on the short lines and margins, hoping for a late run of big fish.

Switching the short line from corn to 6mm pellet and then later paste, resulted in more carp than skimmers, but I probably got a bit too aggressive with the feed as I couldn’t keep the line going towards the end.

Down my margins, the left side was far better than the right which was full of scum. It was necessary to feed quite heavily with micros and corn to get the fish in. Initially I caught on paste, before that went funny, but a switch to double corn was much better, although trying to line up the fish was tricky.

Overall, I felt I should have caught more and in hindsight I should have stayed on the short line for longer during the early part of the match.

1.    150- 4 – Matt Hamilton – p5

2.    144-10 – Alan Smith – p7

3.    136- 8 – Phil Gooding – p10

4.      92- 6 – Ken Rayner – p8

5.      89- 8 – Mick O’Brien – p16

Silvers

1.      20- 8 – Alan Smith – p7

2.      15- 0 – Matt Hamilton – p5

3.      12- 6 – Mick O’Brien – p16

4.      12- 4 – Ian Millichip – p12

5.      12- 0 – Paul Baker – p9