All the Gear, No Idea: 20 May 2015, Twin Oaks (White Acres)

Regular readers will know that my recent drawing form on the lower numbered Twin Oaks has been rather good - so good in fact that my two most recent visits to this lake have seen me on the 'best peg in the country' (16 of course)!!! Therefore when peg 6 stuck to my mitt it just about summed-up how my week has been going!!!

Make or break time

In all fairness peg 6 is a good draw in this festival as it is part of a section that covers 1-6, so I'd effectively be fishing a different match to those in the big weight section (13-18).

Lights, camera, action!

The View from my Peg (YouTube)

As I knew I'd be fishing for somewhere between 30 and 40 pounds for good section points (not that this really matters after yesterday) I decided to cover a few options, namely: my usual pellet feeder rod for tight over to the far margin; 3 rigs for the long pole shallow (2 jiggas and a swinger); a rig for skimmers at top kit plus two (0.15 mainline, 4x14 KC Carpa Force, 0.13 hooklength, size 16 LWG, bulk and one dropper, blue Hydro); and a margin rig just in case some munters turned-up under my feet.

Looking left towards peg 1

On the whistle I had two minutes dobbing about on my margin rig looking for an early mug fish - as per usual this tactic failed so I was soon onto the pellet feeder and into a 10 ounce roach (!) and a 3lb carp before this line died on the third cast!

In for a penny, ...

This saw a switch to the 5m line and after feeding six balls of Old Ghost Green Alga I managed to winkle-out two nice skimmers on dead maggots leaving me on 7lb after the first hour - hardly flying but better than yesterday!

A skimmer from the 5m line

The second hour however was pretty slow with just one or two skimmers from the 5m line, though I did spend a fruitless 30 minutes on the long pole shallow trying to get into some F1s - this was rather disappointing as I'd hoped this would've been a productive tactic now that the wind had finally died-off. The third hour was OK with a decent F1 out of the blue on the pellet feeder and four reasonable skimmers on the pole at 5m moving me on to 18 pounds or so.

The view to the right

Unfortunately the next hour and fifty minutes were a disaster with nothing but 3 of the world's smallest roach going into the net - the 5m line basically died and I spent a lot of time fishing into the deeper water this side of the bottom of the far shelf into 'no man's land' (so-called by Simon Gould who caught a lot of fish on this line yesterday from peg 12). Part of the problem was that I hooked and eventually lost a very, very big fish on this line first cast, so I stuck on it longer that I should have - having said that I think this could be a very useful tactic to explore in the future as basically nobody seems to fish beyond 14.5m from the near bank or further than 2m from the far bank, leaving a massive safe zone in between!

Back on the pellet feeder

Luckily the final ten minutes saw two pulls and two good carp tight over on the pellet feeder, giving me a reasonable 29-0-0 - a reasonable weight until peg 1 weighed in 50-8-0 and I was then proceeded to be beaten by 32-13-0, 31-8-0 and 30-0-0, only managing to beat 28-6-0 for 2 points once again!