Godalming
Angling Society provide access to a number of stillwaters and stretches of the
River Wey in and around the Milford/Godalming/Farncombe area of Surrey and one
of the venues used several times a year for club matches is Busbridge.
This is best described as an estate lake, but is similar in many ways to the Big Lake at Furnace Lakes – it is a fairly long/thin lake with a dam wall at one end and platforms on both of the long sides with anglers on one bank facing those on the other. Busbridge contains specimen carp and pike but the match angler’s quarry is typically skimmers/bream in the 12 ounce to 4 pound bracket.
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| Busbridge (a Godalming AS water) |
This is best described as an estate lake, but is similar in many ways to the Big Lake at Furnace Lakes – it is a fairly long/thin lake with a dam wall at one end and platforms on both of the long sides with anglers on one bank facing those on the other. Busbridge contains specimen carp and pike but the match angler’s quarry is typically skimmers/bream in the 12 ounce to 4 pound bracket.
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| Looking across the lake from peg 31 |
Today’s draw was
held in the Weatherspoon’s on Godalming High Street and I have to say I was
impressed with the breakfast – a large breakfast, a bacon roll and two hot
drinks for less than £7.50! After finishing my bacon and hash browns I slipped
my hand into the bag of dreams and (some of you may not be surprised to hear that)
I found one of the end peg fliers (number 31 to be precise) stuck to my trusty
right hand!!! This peg is towards the far end of the lake away from the dam
wall and as is typical of this kind of lake as it is much shallower that the
dam wall end – probably six feet versus 12 or 15. Today it also had the massive
advantage of not being double banked as the last angler on the far side was
pegged opposite peg 33. (If only I could draw like this every week!!!)
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| A choice of open-end feeders |
Given the target
today was bream I decided to focus on the feeder and left my pole and waggler
rods in the bag. I set-up two tip rods at the start – one for fishing with a
traditional open-end feeder, the other for a 24g Guru method feeder with a 10cm
hooklength of 0.19 Reflo Power into a size 16 QM1 for use with a 6mm hard
pellet in a hair-rigged pellet band.
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| The QM1 in a loop hooklength |
I selected two
hooklengths to complete the open-end feeder set-up – the first was 30cm of 0.19
Reflo Power into a size 14 QM1 for use with a hair-rigged 8mm boilie, the other
was a slightly less conventional arrangement for fishing dead maggots. Since
I’ve started using the QM1 hook from Guru I’ve been amazed by the lack of lost fish
and I use them all the time for hair-rigged baits on the tip – however today
for the first time I used a size 16 QM1 tied into a small loop for the direct
mounting of three dead red maggots. This sounds a little unconventional but
looked pretty good as part of a 45cm hooklength of 0.15 Reflo Power. (It’s
worth noting that the 30cm hooklength featured a total of 4 number 8 stotz – 2
an inch from the hook to keep the intended pop-up close to the deck and two
others evenly spread 10cm apart to keep the hooklength pinned to the bottom.)
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| Today’s bait selection |
Bait for today included half a kilo of Sonubait’s F1 Dark sweet fishmeal groundbait, half a pint of dead red maggots, one pint of 4mm hard pellets and some softened 2mm pellets mixed with Mainline Cell stick mix liquid and Sonubait’s Stiki Pellet powder for added attraction and stickability on the method feeder. These baits were complemented with some hard 6mm pellets and a tub of Bait-Tech fluro pop-ups for the hook.
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| Looking towards the shallow end of the lake |
Given the fact
that I was on an end peg flier, and taking into account some mistakes regarding
not feeding enough made on a recent visit to Furnace Lakes, I decided to be
positive and at the start I ‘spodded’ seven Drennan XL feeders worth of 4mm
pellets, dead maggots and groundbait down the middle of the lake at about 25m.
(At the time this seemed like a lot of bait but in hindsight this was probably
equivalent to 2 large pole pots of bait – if I’d had used the pole today I’d
had fed two or three times this amount to create a bed of bait for the intended
bream to settle over.) I then switched to a mini Drennan cage feeder (the 15g version)
and attached the QM1 in a loop hooklength with three dead reds. Nothing first
cast, but a nice bite on chuck number two settled the nerves and proved the new
set-up was working – in total I landed five nice skimmers/bream in the first
hour and I’d put last week’s blank to bed already!
The second hour
saw 6 more fish in the net – 2 on the method feeder and 4 to a fluro yellow 8mm
pop-up on the open-end feeder with the 30cm hooklength. Things started to slow
after two and a half hours so I ‘re-spodded’ with 6 more XL feeders worth of
bait and this lead to another run of fish – after 3 hours I had a total of 15
in the net.
Things once
again slowed at the beginning of the fourth hour but this time I decided to
play it safe and see if the fish would return of their own accord – but with
the exception of one bream (that was hooked after the bait had been in the
water for 17 minutes) they didn’t so with 90 minutes left on the clock I
‘re-spodded’ with 5 feeders worth of bait. This ultimately saw three more fish
hit the net before the ‘all out’ to leave me with a total of 19.
Roger Howe
(Godalming AS match secretary who I’d had the pleasure of being pegged next to
today) was soon ‘round with the scales and I was very pleased to see that my
fish went for a total of 44-6-0. As it turned-out the rest of the lake had
fished pretty hard with only the odd bream and tench being caught so I’d done
enough to win on the day.
The top 4:
- Phil Morris (yours truly), 44-6-0
- Roger Howe, 7-5-0
- Andy Rogers, 5-6-0
- Mick Redman, 5-2-0
Section winners:
- Dave Woolgar
- Ian Covey
Whilst of course
I was pleased to win the match it does show how peggy certain venues can be in
the winter (after all I did blank at Willow
Park last week) and a
good draw really is vital – roll-on summer I say!!!
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@philip_r_morris
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