Secret teams of 4 events featuring anglers from Godalming and Woking at MBK Coloured Ponds are like London buses – nothing for ages then two come along at once! In a similar fashion to the match I wrote about back in May, today’s match saw 32 anglers (16 from each club) randomly assigned to one of eight teams, with one angler from each team on each of the 4 lakes. (Each angler draws their own peg as per a conventional match, but each peg is pre-allocated to a team by the match organiser.)
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| Summer finally arrives in the UK! |
The obvious difference with this match was the weather – it had been very hot and sunny in the previous days and today was forecast to be a real scorcher with no wind. (Not normally ideal for catching fish, but given the some of the weather we’ve faced so far in 2013 who’s complaining?)
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| Sir Ken Cardwell and some of the Woking chaps prepare for the draw |
As ever I was hoping for a corner peg on Pond 4 – so of course I ended-up in the middle of Pond 2!!! Having said that peg 5 was a nice looking swim with plenty of open water to attack – plus the pegging on the day meant that I had two spare pegs to my left and one to the right, with the platforms of pegs 4 and 6 both reachable with 10m of pole. The only area of concern was the presence of lily pads and Canadian pond weed – both of which can lead to lost fish and broken pole sections!!!
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| Simple bait requirements for the straight lead |
In terms of bait I’d split the frugal 2 pint pellet limit equally between 8mm hard pellets for the straight lead and the same of 6s for the pole (and straight lead at a push). I’d also brought some corn, a pint of red maggots, a bag of Sonubaits 50:50 groundbait and a tub of worms left-over from White Acres – ideally to be used down the edge. A Tub of mixed Ringers pop-up boilies/Banded Allsorts and two tubes of Kiana Goo rounded things off on the bait front.
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| Looking across the lake to Perry Gray on another corner draw! |
As ever there were loads of cruising fish visible in the upper layers so before the start I decided to set-up a dumpy 6g Preston Innovations pellet waggler (the type that are loaded with an optional disk to stop them diving too deeply) on 6lb Daiwa Sensor mainline with a 25cm hooklength of 0.19 Reflo Power to a size 16 Guru Pellet Waggler hook and a hair-rigged pellet band. I also set-up a straight lead rod with 8lb mainline, a one third of an once Guru square bomb and a 30cm hooklength consisting of 0.19 Guru N-Gauge to a size 14 QM1 with a hair-rigged pellet band.
(It’s worth noting that MBK rules dictate that the shallowest you can set a float for open water is 2 feet deep and that hooklengths for legering must be a minimum of 30cm – effectively ruling-out the method feeder.)
On the “all-in” I cast my bomb to about 25m with a bright orange Ringers Banded Allsort and started feeding 8mm pellets via a catapult – given the weather I was expecting a tough match and a slow start so I was very pleased to bag 3 small (1 to 2lb) carp in the first 3 casts, ultimately putting 10 in the net in the first hour. (These were either caught on a 8mm pellet or a bright orange Ringers Banded Allsort – for some reason I couldn’t get a bite on a yellow one!)
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| PVA bags with some added Tutti Frutti Goo reignited the peg |
Towards the end of the first hour things had started to slow so at about 11 o’clock change was in order – I replaced the 1/3 ounce bomb with a heavier 2/3 ounce version and attached a small PVA bag of 6mm pellets with some Tutti Frutti Goo squirted on the outside. This approach yielded 3 further fish over the next half hour – bites were fairly slow to develop but the stamp of fish was twice that of those caught in the first hour.
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| MBK Leisures |
After a good start the period between eleven thirty and one o’clock can only be described as ‘desperate’ – I spent 90 minutes chasing shadows and didn’t put a single thing in the net! The straight lead line had dried-up and I thought it was too early for the margins so I decided to try and copy Andy Rogers on peg 3 who had been successfully spraying maggots and mugging cruising carp with a light waggler set-up – big mistake!!! (If I’m always the first to tell people who ask that they should play to their strengths in a match then why did I waste an hour and a half mucking about on a method I’m clearly no good at?!?)
The idea behind this approach is that you pull a number of fish into your peg with loose-fed maggots and when a suitable specimen comes into view (and range) you cast your hookbait just in front of it’s nose.(There are always loads of visible fish in the upper layers during the summer at MBK Coloured Ponds.) Andy has this approach down to a tee but frankly I’ll be sticking to the method feeder in the future!!!
With hindsight my problems were threefold – firstly I was spraying too many maggots over too wide an area; secondly I was far too impatient and simply kept casting without being able to see a fish in the peg; and finally my waggler was too light for the 11’ pellet waggler rod and 6lb line I was using, so when I could see a big fish I couldn’t cast to it accurately. (But apart from that I was doing it perfectly!!!)
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| Lily pads and a spare peg to the left |
Over recent weeks I’ve been trying to leave any margin lines as late as I can – feeding and fishing a margin line too early seems to lead to an odd fish or two but then the line dies, whereas leaving it later seems to mean more fish stay in the peg for longer. (Of course there is a trade-off as leaving a margin line too late means you’ve limited the amount of time you have before the “all out” to actually catch ‘em!)
However given the previous 90 minutes I was in serious catch-up mode so I decided to feed my left margin (which was at about 10m to the vacant platform 6) I decided to feed a small amount of corn and 6mm pellet at 1300. I was in two minds as to giving the straight lead another go whilst this swim settled but for some reason I decided to go straight in with a single grain of corn – it was a good job I did as this move lead to 3 decent carp in the net in double-quick time!!!
(The tackle for this line was my ‘light’ margin set-up – 0.17 Guru N-Gauge mainline to a hooklength of 0.15 with a size 16 eyed B911. The float was a 4x10 Preston Innovations Durafloat 10 and the elastic black Hydro.)
Unbelievably a dabble on the straight lead following a re-feed on the margin saw two more carp added to the total, and altogether the spell between one o’clock and two fifteen produced about 10 carp for roughly 30lb – which added to the 20lb from the first 90 minutes meant I was in a good position with approximately 50lb in the bag going into the vital final stage of the match.
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| My right margin – peg 4’s platform |
As today’s match was a 6 hour affair starting at 10 o’clock the final phase of the match (the bit where everybody prays for some Billy Bunters to turn-up in their margin) was slightly longer than normal and would go on until 1600. As my left margin was starting to slow and as I had a second accessible platform to my right I decided to gamble a little a drop three large pots of Sonubaits 50:50 groundbait in front of peg 4’s platform – whilst this has worked well on other venues I’ve never been able to make this tactic work here before (hence the “gamble”).
Well I needn’t have worried as shortly after potting in the final load of groundbait there were visible tail patterns and clearly fish on the bait immediately!!! First drop in with half a worm lead to an immediate bite and an angry carp screaming out of the peg at a hundred miles an hour – happy days!!! This set the pattern for the rest of the match and after plundering the right margin for a few initial fish I converted the left margin to the same groundbait and worm approach with the same positive impact – having two productive margin swims was a great bonus and I was simply able to switch from left to right, re-feeding and picking-off the odd fish until the end of the match.
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| The all important scores on the doors |
It was soon my turn to weigh-in and my two nets went a pleasing 86-7-0 – a new personal best for the venue and enough for a lake/section win as I’d just done enough to sneak past D Smith’s creditable 79-2-0 from corner peg 18.
Overall the venue fished very well with 2 ton plus weights, a 90, two 80s and numerous 50s, 60s and 70s. Lake/section winners:
- J Brownlie, 66-12-0, Pond 1 peg 4
- P Morris, 86-7-0, Pond 2 peg 5
- D Steer, 119-6-0, Pond 3 peg 7
- M Cook, 115-6-0, Pond 4 peg 3
On the team front my quartet crashed to a disappointing seventh (from eight), but at the top the first 3 were separated by only 2 points. Team result:
- Team C (C Kampa, S Smith, K Cardwell, R Fiander), 23 points
- Team H (F Bevan, A Rogers, S Kendall, C Salmon), 22 points
- Team B (J Brownlie, C Underwood, A N Other, M Cook), 21 points
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| It was hot in the car park! |
Conclusions: whilst in the end I got out of jail I can’t help but reflect that the 90 fishless minutes that formed the second quarter of my match could have been disastrous – this isn’t the first time I’ve wasted a large portion of a match on an untested long-shot and in future I’ll be sticking to the plan and leaving such experimenting for pleasure sessions!!! On the plus side the scaled-down margin gear was very effective on the day – perhaps the reason I’d failed to catch down the edge in previous visits to the MBK Coloured Ponds was my unnecessarily over the top use of 0.19 mainline straight through to a size 12 hook with a giant hookbait?
Until next time …
Until next time …
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