29/10/23 - Ivy House - Heron

Weight - 80lb 4oz

Catch - 77 Carp, 27 F1, 1 Gudgeon

Weather - Mostly sunny, with occasional shower

Match - Open (5 fished) - 3rd overall

Back to Ivy House to try and get back in tune with the venue with the Winter League starting next week. I had the choice of either the Old Match Lake or Heron. I chose Heron as I fished the Old Match Lake last week, which was hard going, and I at least would get a few bites on Heron.

Unfortunately, by splitting the 2 matches, it meant there was only 5 of us on Heron, so it wasn’t going to give me a realistic feel for how the lake would fish. The question was whether I should go down the pellet or maggot route and I settled on maggot, purely because maggot will feature more as we move towards winter and I bought 3 pts of live whites and 2pts of dead’s. I also set up a pellet rig just in case.

I drew peg 3, which was largely irrelevant due to having so much space. As the lake has been fishing well, I decided to target 20 fish an hour over the next 5hrs which should give me about 120lb.

Starting at 2+2 on 4mm expander it took me 10mins before I netted my first fish and after 30mins I was up to 7, however I had nothing bigger than 12oz.

Moving out to 13m where I fed some 4s resulted in more tiny carp and I was going nowhere fast. A switch to the shallow rig and I at last caught some decent F1s on 6mm pellet over pinged 4s, catching between 8 & 12in.

In the meantime, I had been feeding maggot and crushed expander down each margin, so when the shallow line faded, I switched to the margins. The right side was definitely the best as it was deeper, but tiny carp were an issue again.

I had another run on the shallow line, but couldn’t keep it going, so decided to stay focused on the margin and hope for better fish to turn. By cutting out the groundbait and just feeding maggot I did catch a few better fish.

I had also been feeding maggot on my 2+2 line, which again produced more tiny carp. Dumping maggot produced a decent carp 1^st put in before the tiny carp returned.

In the end I had more fish than anyone else, with the last hour producing 32 but far too many small fish. I think maggot was still the right approach and I think those tiny carp would have spread out a bit more had there been more anglers on the lake.

1.    106-  9 – Pete Philips – p6

2.      81-  0 – Martin – p8

3.      80-  4 – Ken Rayner – p3