Writing a blog entry about fishing a match where you blanked is nearly as boring as reading one somebody else has written - so feel free to tune-out and tune back when spring 2013 finally arrives! For those of you still reading ...
Marsh Farm near Milford, Surrey
My view is that Marsh Farm is a cracking venue - it is very accessible, there is a great on-site tackle shop and the fishing is something slightly different to the norm as the main target species are tench and crucian carp (which have grown-on very well, with many being of specimen proportions). However these species only really come to the fore during late spring / summer / early autumn, and the desperately cold weather we've been experiencing lately (apparently March 2013 was the coldest in the UK for fifty odd years) has taken it's toll - a match fished on Richardson's Lake on Friday saw 21 of the 26 anglers blank!
Today's match saw a total of 14 anglers take to the banks of Harris Lake, and my dip into the bag of dreams saw me land on peg 38 - normally a decent enough draw on the far side of the complex and as with the majority of the pegs it has roughly a 25m chuck to one of the central islands.
Looking left
Unfortunately this lake is exposed to the wind at the best of times and
today (as most days for what seems like weeks) a savage north easterly
wind was blowing making conditions nearly unbearable - this coupled with crystal clear water (I could see the whole of my keepnet and the bottom of the lake 4-5m from the bank) was going to make things very tough indeed!
My bait tray for the first two hours!
I knew from experience that under such conditions it is very easy to overfeed so at the start I simply set-up one tip rod to fish the straight lead with a white 8mm boilie - my thinking being that a pile of bait would spook any fish in the area but a single bait would possibly tempt a passing fish.
On the all-in I cast my bait towards the bottom of the far shelf (7-8m from the island) and tried to keep warm - unfortunately after 65 minutes I'd not had the slightest indication of a fish and I was so cold I had to leg it into the tackle shop to get warmed-up!!! 15 minutes later I was back on the bank but a fruitless 40 minute cast meant that 2 hours had passed and my enthusiasm had started to wane.
2mm pellets, Cell liquid and yellow boilie dye
Clearly a change of tack was required so I soaked some 2mm pellets and added some Cell stick mix liquid with a little yellow boilie dye. This was combined with half a kilo of Sonubaits F1 Black groundbait to make a very inviting looking (to me at least) mix for the groundbait feeder.
Black groundbait with yellow pellets, dead maggots
So I swapped my two thirds of an ounce Guru square bomb for a micro Drennan stainless cage feeder (a 10g model with an extra 5g added) and my 30cm / 0.19 / size 14 Guru QM1 hooklength for 45cm of 0.15 with a size 18 QM1 in a loop, slipped two dead red maggots onto the hook, loaded the feeder with my new mix and cast out full of expectation - unfortunately the fish hadn't read the script and 3 windswept hours later I'd blanked for the second time this year and for the third time in four visits to Marsh Farm!!!
Harris Lake, Marsh Farm
Rather unsportingly I legged it home as soon as the all-out was called so at the time of writing I can't give you the final result - though from what I could see about half of the field also blanked but Ian Dixon seemed to be winning with 4 fish and Mark Harrington, Colin Underwood and perhaps one or two others close behind with 2 fish each.
It's been said before, but I'll say it again - roll-on summer!
Three pairs of
socks. Two long sleeved thermal vests. Two pairs of thermal long johns. One
T-shirt. One pair of heavy weight walking trousers. One fleece top. Two fleece
jackets. A bib and brace. A Gore-Tex jacket. A baseball cap and a woolly hat.
Welcome to spring 2013 in the south of England!!!
Bramley Park Lake
After (sensibly)
giving last weekend a miss due to the freezing winds and heavy rains I joined
eleven other hardy souls (a mixture of club stalwarts and southern legends Ian
Dixon, Dave Steer and Dave Johnson) for a Godalming AS club match at Bramley Park
Lake.
Aerial photo of the lake from Google Earth
Bramley is one
of Godalming Angling Society’s stillwaters and is a three acre venue near Guildford. The main species are skimmers, tench and roach
– though there are a few twenty pound plus grass carp that occasionally win
matches with a single bite!
Sir Ken Cardwell
This venue has
over the years been badly effected by cormorants – however sterling work by the
club and Bramley head bailiff Ken Cardwell (including the creation of five mini
islands that act as fish refuges and regular restocking), have lead to decent
match catches.
I adopted my
usual drawing posture (right foot off the ground, left hand into the bag of
dreams) and out popped peg 8 – in an area that has apparently fishing well, a
suggestion reinforced by the fact that pegs 7, 9, 10 and 11 had also been
included despite the venue boasting 32 swims.
Before the start
I set-up a tip rod and 2 pole rigs – though I won’t go into details of these
pole rigs as I never actually tried the pole during the match! The tip rod was
my usual 10’ Preston Innovations Carbonactive Mini Carp, matched with a Daiwa TD-R
3012D loaded with 8lb Daiwa Sensor. It was set-up to fish a running rig so on
went a Preston feedabead, and my now trusty 45cm of 0.15 Guru N-Gauge with a
size 18 QM1 (in a loop) was slipped inside a loop made from a figure of 8 knot
in my main line – one of the advantages of using 8lb main line is that you
don’t need anything to stop a feedabead slipping down onto the hooklength,
helping to keep the rig as simple as possible!
Drennan feeders used today
Before the ‘all
in’ I removed my hooklength and attached a large green Drennan groundbait
feeder in anticipation of launching 10 lots of dead maggots, 4mm pellets and
Sonubait’s F1 Black in my swim at 35m.
Having done so I
swapped to a micro Drennan stainless cage feeder, reattached the hooklength and
slipped two dead read maggots onto the hook before casting out with much
anticipation! Nothing first cast (which I left in place for 12 minutes), but 5
minutes into cast number two the tip launched itself into a nice curve and a
pound and a half skimmer was soon in the net.
Unfortunately
this was something of a false dawn and it took until the end of the second hour
for my next bite – though this time it was a better specimen of about 3lb. By
this point I was well behind the leaders (who had 4 or 5 fish each), but I knew
I wasn’t out of it if I could put a run of fish together.
A Ringers 8mm pop-up
The banjo feeder rig
Again this
turned-out to be wishful thinking as despite persisting with the cage feeder
and trying a fluro pop-up on the straight lead and the banjo feeder with micro pellets and a 6mm on the hook, I was only
able to land one more skimmer and a small roach (both on the cage feeder) to
give me a total of 5-14-0.
Looking left from peg 8
This left me
sixth or seventh (from 12) and well behind the leaders who all managed 7 or 8
skimmers each.
The top 3:
Colin Underwood,
20-14-0
Perry Gray,
19-4-0
Chris Kampa,
18-14-0
Well done to all
of those that braved the arctic conditions, but the question on everyone’s lips
is: when is spring 2013 finally going to arrive?
Following last week’s success at Busbridge I was really looking forward to having the chance to make-up for blanking on my previous visit to Willow Park – especially as the temperature gauge in the car was showing a balmy 8 degrees Celsius at seven thirty in the morning!
Nice and mild for a change!
Even though three of my six fishing trips in 2013 to date have been to Willow Park I’m a relative newcomer to the venue, so when I pulled peg 25 on Middle Lake out of the bag of dreams it didn’t mean much to me – however when I realised I was the only person pegged on the road bank with three spare pegs either side and the other three banks had most of the pegs in I started to think I’d drawn rather badly!!! (This was reinforced by a tweet from venue regular Pemb Wrighting that simply read ‘oh dear’.)
However, like most people I only get to go fishing once a week so I was determined to be positive and make the most of my day on the bank. A couple of texts from my mate Ian McClaren (known as The Bard on the Matchfishing-scene website) confirmed my thinking on how to approach the peg and I settled on an open-end feeder, a straight lead rod for fishing with a pellet cone and the pole at 14.5m.
The two different types of hooklength for the open-end feeder
In conjunction with the open-end feeder I’d be using two different hooklengths – 30cm of 0.17 Reflo Power into a size 16 Guru QM1 with a hair-rigged band for a 6mm pellet and 45cm of 0.15 Guru N-Gauge with a size 18 QM1 tied into a loop for fishing two dead read maggots.
Bits and bobs for the 'QM1 in a loop' arrangement
Since using the QM1 in a loop last week at Busbridge I’ve been thinking about ways to fine tune it and I’ve decided to make the loop that the hook runs in neater by making it nice and small using the little green plastic device shown above (it’s a Seymo loop tyer and I use the pair of pins with the smallest gap).
The two different feeders used today
On the whistle I clipped-on a large green Drennan groundbait feeder and ‘spodded’ ten loads of Sonubait’s F1 Dark groundbait, dead read maggots and soaked 4mm fishery pellets at about 30m slightly to the right. (This was a something of a gamble given the time of year, but as Del Boy Trotter would say ‘he who dares Rodney, he who dares’!!!)
In order to allow this line to settle I then picked-up the pellet cone rod and cast to about 35m slightly to the left in the hope of landing an early bonus – however no indications after 15 minutes saw me reaching for the open-end feeder rod again, this time with a mini Drennan stainless cage feeder and the 45cm QM1 in a loop hooklength attached. By this time it was 1025 and I hadn’t seen anybody catch anything yet - hence I was more than happy to see the tip fly ‘round first cast with a positive bite and a big fat F1 was in the net in double-quick time!
I was even happier to see my 10’ Preston Mini Carp rod nearly dragged into the lake within about 5 seconds of my feeder hitting the deck on cast number 2 and an even bigger and fatter F1 joined its friend in the net!!! I had a couple more casts with double dead read maggot without any indications, but a switch to the hair-rigged pellet band hooklength and a 6mm pellet gained an immediate response and I was onto 3 F1s for about 9lb at the end of the first hour.
Another view from peg 25
As bites were now very few and far between I decided to put some more bait into the main feeder line and re-spodded with 5 large feeders worth of bait. To give this line a chance to settle I had a quick go with the straight lead rod (no pellet cone this time) over an area at about 25m to the left that I’d been loose feeding with a few 6mm fishery pellets via a catapult. Unfortunately this didn’t yield any indications, but a switch back to the main feeder line did see two nice skimmers in the net – one on maggot, one on 6mm pellet.
This meant that at the end of the second hour I had 5 decent fish in the net for approximately 15lb and I felt as though I was doing well as I hadn’t seen anyone else catch as many – however the wheels started to come-off during the third hour as I didn’t have any indications whatsoever and Chris Love, Alex Clements and Rob Harvey all started bagging-up and easily overtook me!
The Mo Brown Slim'o
Despite not catching anything during the third hour I had started to feed my 14.5m pole line with soaked 2mm fishery pellets, and just as I was becoming rather despondent halfway through the fourth hour I hooked and landed two nice skimmers in a row on a 4mm expander pellet. (The rig for the pole included a 0.1g Mo Brown Slim’o on 0.13 Reflo Power into a hooklength of the same material in 0.10 with a size 20 Tubertini 808. Elastic was pink Hydro. Shotting was five number 8 stotz spread evenly 20-40cm from hook.)
During the fourth hour I also caught another big skimmer on the main feeder line to put me on 8 fish for a good twenty pounds – I knew I was miles behind Chris Love and Rob Harvey, but given my iffy draw I was pleased to be in contention with Alex Clements and Mark Burrows (amongst others) as the best of the rest.
The view towards the Small Lake
The start of the final hour saw 5 more large feeders worth of bait applied to the feeder line as a final gamble – though in the end this didn’t pay-off as no more fish were to fall to the feeder. Unfortunately it was the same on the pole, but I did (rather annoyingly) contrive to miss two proper bites that were presumably from decent skimmers.
That left me on 8 fish that went 23-14-0 – a decent result given my previous blank and a somewhat dodgy draw! Rob Harvey’s 3 F1s and 15 skimmers were enough to beat Chris Love’s 15 skimmers by a mere 5 ounces to take the victory, and Mark Burrows’ catch pushed me down to fourth by 10 ounces – small margins, eh?
Final result (based on weight only):
Rob Harvey, 53-15-0
Chris Love, 53-10-0
Mark Burrows, 24-8-0
Phil Morris (yours truly), 23-14-0
Final result (based on the continental pay-out system used at Willow Park):
Rob Harvey, 53-15-0
Dougie Graves, 19-6-0
Chris Love, 53-10-0
Ian Covey, 13-2-0
So all-in-all another enjoyable day at Willow Park – a cracking breakfast and some decent fishing given the time of year. All I have to do now is figure-out how to catch an additional 30lb to win outright – or failing that learn how to draw in the right section so I can finally take some money from Ian Covey!!!
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.
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.
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!!!)
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.
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.)
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.
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!!!
I started my last match write-up with a quote from Jon Arthur about people who only post details of matches where they’ve had a good result – I’m wishing now that I’d have saved that quote for this blog entry as this week I didn’t even induce a vague suspicion of a bite!!!
The Small Lake at Willow Park
After yet another weekend without fishing today saw me line-up with five other hardy souls to brave the arctic conditions at Willow Park for the Saturday open on the Small Lake. Despite living reasonably close to Ash I’ve only fished Willow Park five times in total and every visit has seen me on the Middle Lake – so when it was announced that the match was going to be a rover-style draw I wasn’t too impressed as the task of outwitting the venue experts just got a lot tougher!!! (I can understand why this match was made a walk-off but it really does load the dice in favour of the venue’s regulars and doesn’t do much to encourage new faces who by definition don’t have an intimate knowledge of the fliers.)
Prior to the draw I had a walk along the pegs in front of the shop and a quick scan of the results from the previous week’s matches on the white board in the cafe, so when I drew second choice of pegs I plumped for peg one as I wanted to experience the thrill of fishing an end peg for a change!
In all seriousness not knowing the venue very well at all I had to focus on what I could see to be fish holding features and the inviting looking long margin into the corner with an overhanging tree seemed to fit the bill perfectly – though unfortunately nobody had told the fish!!!
The dobbing rig
Given the nature of the lake open matches are restricted to float only I settled on two pole lines, the first of which was for ‘dobbing’ bread along the margin under the tree towards the corner – the basic idea of this method being that you search your peg with a highly visible bait (two punches of 7mm bread in this case) looking for the fish (as opposed to feeding a certain area in an attempt to have the fish come to you). It can be seen from the diagram above that the area under the tree was pretty deep for a margin at 3 and a half feet deep, and my rig was more often than not set at 3’ deep.
Long pole rigs
My other line was straight in front at 14.5m for which I set-up three different rigs to fish on the same spot – an 0.15/0.13/B911 size 18/4x14 KC Carpa Chimp rig on blue Hydrolastic for corn, an 0.13/0.10/B911 size 20 with a band/0.2g Mo Brown Slim’o rig on pink Hydrolastic for a 4mm hard pellet and an 0.11/0.10/Gamakatsu Black size 18/4x16 KC Carpa Chimp rig also on pink Hydrolastic for laying-on with single or double dead red maggot.
My bait selection
My bait for the today consisted of 4 slices of Warburton’s Toastie for punching, some frozen (then defrosted) red maggots and corn from my last outing to Furnace Lakes, a bag of soaked 2mm fishery pellets and a small amount of 4mm pellets – some straight out of the bag (for mounting on a hair-rigged pellet band) and some soaked for feeding.
Whilst I’d use the same rigs and feed in the same fashion if I fished the venue at this time of year again (I fed nothing under the tree and a total of no more than 10 dead maggots and the equivalent of three or four of the smallest Preston Innovations Cad pots of 2mm pellets on the 14.5m line) I never had a single bite all day!!! Whilst I felt I fished well I’d made a fatal error at the draw in selecting a corner peg with a freezing north easterly blowing into it, something I couldn’t recover from – something of a schoolboy error really!!!
Looking across the lake to pegs 27 and 28
In the end Rob Harvey fished a great match to win easily from peg 27, and Colin Carr tempted two nice carp from his right-hand margin to finish second from peg 28. Final result:
I saw an interesting tweet from Pole Fishing magazine editor Jon Arthur the other week – it essentially suggested that some people only posted details of matches they’ve done well in. Read-on for evidence that this is not always the case!!!
The Big Lake at Furnace Lakes
Today’s match (only my third of 2013 and the first where I’ve been able to get on the bank on two consecutive weekends) was a three-way club match between GodalmingAS, Dorking DAS and Woking DAA at FurnaceLakes. This was also my first trip to this venue, a nice looking place with a number of different ponds covering match fishing and specimen hunting.
This time last year Furnace was the place to go in winter with local legends such as Steve Gardner, Jimmy Bullard and Steve Sanders smashing-out huge bags of skimmers on a weekly basis – in fact prior to this match I re-read the Will Raison e-magazine from February 2012 where he absolutely bagged-up on the long pole with pellets! However word on the Match Fishing Scene website (special thanks go to Mark Hathaway) and results in the angling press suggested that those days were over with winning catches as low as 20 pounds with some very poor back-up weights …
Today’s match was on Furnace Lake, which is essentially a long rectangle with a dam at one end and platforms/pontoons on both banks – however it is pretty wide with probably 100m from bank to bank so the anglers on one side of the lake don’t really affect those on the other. My homework suggested that the target fish were skimmers in the 12 ounce to 2 pound bracket.
Despite the terrible weather forecast (more of which later) we had a decent turn-out of 29 anglers and my draw saw me on peg 14 on the far-side of the lake, next to one of the four end pegs on the day. (This saw me nearly as far from the dam wall as it was possible to be on the day, something I was fairly happy with as presumably the lake becomes shallower the further from the dam you go.)
Drennan stainless cage feeders
Prior to the match I’d settled on a three pronged attack – a traditional open-end feeder approach, coupled with two long pole lines (one with groundbait and dead maggots, the other with pellets). My feeder rig was very simple – the usual Preston Innovations 10’ Mini Carp rod and 8lb Daiwa Sensor main line coupled with a Drennan stainless cage feeder and a ready-tied Preston Innovations hook-to-nylon featuring a size 20 hook and 18 inches of 2.5lb line. The feeder in question was the micro version – this is a very small feeder that normally only carries a 10g loading. Whilst I’m more than happy with the size of the feeder I don’t think it is heavy enough for accurate casting, so as you can see from the photo above I’ve added an additional 5g in the form of a stick-on feeder weight.
Today's pole gear
It was pretty deep at 14.5m (6-7’) and given the fairly strong right to left cross wind I settled on 4x16 KC Carpa Chimps with a spread bulk of 5 number 8 and 3 number 10 stotz positioned between 20 and 40cm from the hook. Main line was 0.11 Reflo Power and the elastic was pink hydro – the rig for the groundbait/dead maggot line featured a 0.10 hooklength and a size 20 Gamakatsu Black, that for fishing over pellets a size 20 Kamasan B911 with a hair rigged micro pellet band.
Another view of peg 14
By the time the all-in was called at 1015 the weather had already started to deteriorate (it had been raining since at least the time I peaked through the curtains at 0645) and things looked set for a grim old day, but I was happy to be on the bank so I set about feeding 2 balls of Marukyu EFG120 and some dead maggots on my left-hand pole line and slipped two dead red maggots on my feeder hooklength before casting to about 30m with a tiny load of the same groundbait and 4 or 5 freebie maggots.
No indications on the tip so I reeled-in after the predetermined 5 minutes to find a two ounce skimmer had attached itself without bothering to give me a pull that I could see – well at least I hadn’t blanked and perhaps I was going to bag-up after all? To cut a long story short that wasn’t to be and except a few liners I had a very uneventful following three hours wondering if was possible to get any colder/wetter!
During this time I did have a couple of goes on the pole but I’d actually packed it away by 1300 – not because I didn’t think it was going to work, but because holding in the freezing rain made my hands so cold I couldn’t feel them properly!!! With 2 hours to go I was being royally bashed-up from the anglers either side (Ian Covey to my left and P Worsfold to my right) – they were hardly bagging but were doing well on the day taking the odd skimmer here and there whilst I was left pulling my hair out (not that I have much to spare these days).
My mini 'spods'!
Desperate tactics were needed to avoid a blow-out so I removed my hooklength and slipped-on a large Drennan open end feeder and ‘spodded’ 6 feeders worth of groundbait, dead maggots and 2/4mm pellets. Half an hour later I was still wondering if I’d done the right thing when the tip pulled ‘round and I was into a decent skimmer – in fact I hooked five skimmers in six casts and put four in the net. Losing a fish led to another quiet spell so I repeated the ‘spodding’ effort, and with fifteen minutes to go I latched onto the first of three more fish in a row.
Ian Covey
So like the rest of the field I’d been battered by the weather but at least my 8 skimmers was a reasonable return and my final 7-13-0 was a significant improvement on the 2 ounces I had in the net with 90 minutes to go! However I hadn’t done enough to trouble those next to me and I’d been well and truly banjoed, with both anglers weighing 14-3-0, enough for joint second just behind the winning 14-6-0. My weight was good enough for fourth in section and as the fourth place overall (Ian Farmer) came from my section I just missed out on an unlikely triple default section payout as they only paid the top 3!
Final result – congratulations to those that made the frame, and to all of those that braved the elements:
First: G Whitting (14-6-0)
Joint Second: P Worsfold and I Covey (both 14-3-0)
Fourth: I Farmer (10-14-0)
As a footnote I’d like to add that today was the first time I’d fished a lake where the water-level had noticeably risen during a match – it must’ve risen 6 inches and the sluice between the Big Lake and the pond below resembled the weir at Buscot I used to fish when I was at school!
In total MBK Leisure control the fishing on ten or so lakes spread across three separate sites near to Rake in Hampshire. These are available on a day ticket basis, but Godalming AS normally hold two or three matches a year on MBK venues as the fishing is normally pretty good and it isn’t too far to travel.
MBK Coloured Ponds
Today’s match was due to be on the lakes at St Patrick’s Lane (also known as Barons Ponds), but there was a last minute switch to the Coloured Ponds – in the end we had 17 anglers spread across Pond 3 and Pond 4. These lakes are at the top of the site and themain stocking is proper carp in the 2-6lb bracket and smallish (4-8 ounce) skimmers.
The four match lakes at Coloured Ponds are all simple rectangles with platforms along the two long sides of each lake – as a result you are facing the anglers on the opposite bank and on most pegs you have about 30m to the imaginary line that divides each lake in half. As with many lakes during the winter the carp tend to shoal together and the corner pegs dominate massively – I think it is fair to say that it is virtually impossible to win from a non-corner peg!
With that in mind I put my hand into the draw bag knowing there were 8 corner pegs and 9 non-corner pegs on offer and promptly drew peg 3 on Pond 3 – one of the pegs that isn’t in a corner! However the pegging was generous and I had a spare peg to my right, two empty platforms to my left and plenty of open water to go at – so having missed the two preceding weekends due to the snow and ice that has gripped the country I was still keen to get stuck in!
Four different lines fished today
Even though it was fairly mild on the day it has been very cold over the last few weeks with plenty of icy water going into the lakes – as a result I decided to cover a few options and let the fish tell me which would be best on the day! You can see from the sketch above that in total I fished four lines today – the straight lead into open water, a 14.5m pole line for carp at 10 o’clock, a line for skimmers at 2 o’clock and a long margin line in 3’ of water to my left.
Baits for the straight lead
I’d be trying a few new things today – one of them would be some of the much talked about Kiana Goo additive smeared onto a small PVA bag of 4mm hard pellets fished in conjunction with an 8mm fluro pop-up on the straight lead rig. (Tackle was my usual 8lb Daiwa Sensor mainline, two thirds of an ounce Guru square bomb, 12 inches of 0.19 Reflo Power with a size 14 Guru QM1 pinned down with two number 8 stotz an inch from the hook.)
All pole rigs included KC Carpa Chimps – I started with 4x14s for the two open water rigs and a 4x12 for down the edge. One of the other new things I was trying today for the first time was pink Hydrolastic – I used this on the skimmer line, blue Hydro for the open water carp rig and white down the edge.
On the whistle I fed a ball of Murukyu EFG120 with some dead maggots on the skimmer line and 10 4mm pellets combined with 5 grains of corn on the 14.5m carp line – then within 30 seconds of dropping in with a single grain of Jolly Green Giant on that carp line I was attached to a 5lb common! It took about 10 minutes to land on the fairly soft blue Hydrolastic but the relatively strong 0.15 mainline and 0.13 hooklength into a size 18 Kamasan B911 meant I was unlikely to be broken. I wasn’t too sure what my target weight was, but regardless I was off to a great start!
The evolution of the skimmer rig
I fed some more 4mm pellets/corn and prayed for another dip – but it didn’t come in the following 10 minutes so by 1030 I was onto the skimmer line. The diagram above shows how my skimmer rig evolved during the match – I started on a 4x14 Chimp with a fairly short length of line between the pole tip and float and a size 18 Tubertini 808 for the direct hooking of dead maggots. This led to a few skimmers but I was being plagued by tiny roach and the increasing wind meant it was difficult to control the rig and hence build a weight, so at about 1115 I cast my straight lead rig to 30m and dived into my box for a heavier 4x16 float and a hooklength for hair-rigging a hard pellet.
No bites had materialised on the tip after 15 minutes so I re-plumbed with my new skimmer rig and slipped-on a 4mm pellet – this saw a run of better skimmers, especially if I took the time to lower the rig in slowly on a tight line as the float would often simply ‘keep going’!
By this time I could see Guildford Angling Centre’s Luke Sheriff bagging from the far corner peg, but I knew the others on my lake were sitting it out for carp without a great deal of success – so I decided to catch skimmers if I could get a bite relatively quickly and only to fish for carp if the skimmer line faded or if one of the others also started catching on a regular basis.
In the end I had one more (two pound) carp on the 14.5m carp line, no bites on the straight lead (which I tried three more times) and nothing down the edge (it was worth a try as you never know your luck) – so 8 or 9lb of my 15-1-0 total was made-up of small skimmers and my decision was vindicated as this was enough for second on the lake. (I was miles behind Luke’s 50 odd pound but I’d beaten the three other corner pegs on my lake.)
Luke’s weight clinched the match from Frankie Bevan who was second with 38lb – I’d finished one out of the frame by a couple of pounds, but with Luke winning the match I’d done enough for a default lake/section win and had plenty of bites in the process! (The easy conclusion to reach here is that I should’ve spent less time fishing for carp and more time on the skimmers – however one more bite from a carp could’ve put me third so it was worth the gamble!)
