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| 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.)
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| The tree overhanging my left margin |
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!!!
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!!!
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| 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:
- Rob Harvey 43-8-0
- Colin Carr 9-0-0
- Mike Hooper 5-10-0
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