Today’s match was a Godalming AS versus Twyford & District Fishing Club event held across MBK Coloured Ponds 2, 3 and 4 – regular readers (and those from the south east of England) will know that this is a pretty decent commercial fishery located near Rake, Hampshire. Despite being easily accessible from the A3 the venue itself is very secluded and provides the leafy, ‘getting away from it all’ backdrop we don’t always get with today’s modern fisheries. Unfortunately, being set in a valley it can often be colder than average and is prone to freezing in the winter. Luckily, despite it being the middle of January, there was no overnight frost last night and in fact today’s weather forecast was for bright sunshine, mild temperatures and absolutely no wind – perfect!
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| Sitting by the side of the road in the dark waiting for a lift! #oldskool |
As my good friend Dave would be travelling to the venue from his home in Guildford via a route that naturally passes pretty close to my place he kindly offered to pick me up on the way today. As a result I soon found myself sitting on my seatbox by the side of the road in the pitch darkness – being early on a Sunday morning I was pretty much left to my own devices, but a wily fox and an old boy on a bike both gave me rather bemused looks as they trotted/rode by!
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| Peg 6 on Pond 4 – Ron’s favourite no doubt |
Being a joint venture today’s match saw an excellent turn-out of 26 competitors – having access to all four of the match lakes it was decided not to use Pond 1 but instead peg 8 or 9 anglers on each of Ponds 2, 3 and 4. This would mean a total of 12 favoured corner and 14 potentially less prolific open water pegs in the bag of dreams – though of coarse the near 50:50 odds of drawing the sort of peg I wanted didn’t stop mean drawing peg 6 on Pond 4 (slap bang in the middle of the bank and as far from a corner as it was possible to get)!!!
Having said that it was a nice enough looking peg and I had a spare platform to my right/two the left – I also had the bonus of being able to ship my pole back to 13m without having to break-down (a luxury not afforded to all pegs along the road bank on this venue).
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| The best laid plans … |
Looking back at some old blogs I realised I’d drawn the peg to the right (number 5) back in May and finished second on the lake with 50lb plus of carp caught on the bomb over heavily loose-fed 8mm pellets. Of coarse those are very much summer tactics and would almost certainly lead to a DNW in the middle of January – as a result I settled on a more prudent two pronged attack based on the straight lead/pellet cone and the pole at 13m with groundbait for some Arnold Rimmers (a little joke for you fans of Red Dwarf and juvenile bream out there).
I also seriously considered setting-up a waggler to search my peg for carp with a nice bright grain of corn – however this is not an approach I’ve ever tried before so I decided to stick to what I know (i.e. fish the tip instead) and build a weight of skimmers on the pole (at least until those in the corners made such tactics null and void by bagging-up on carps).
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| Bait and tools for the pellet cone |
On the whistle I fed my pole line with 2 balls of groundbait (taken from a mix made-up of half a kilo of Sonubaits F1 Dark, a big handful of soaked micro pellets, half a pint of dead fluro pinkies and quarter of a point of dead red maggots) and cast my straight lead set-up towards the middle of the lake. (The rig consisted of a white 8mm Ringers pop-up boilie impaled onto a Guru bait spike that itself was hair-rigged onto 12 inches of 0.22 Guru N-Gauge and a size 14 QM1. Two number 8 stotz pinched onto the line an inch above the hook kept the boilie tantalisingly close to the deck and things were completed with 8lb Daiwa Sensor main line.)
Unfortunately a carefully timed 15 minutes came and went without even the slightest indication of a fish so I reeled in, replaced the boilie with a bright orange Ringers Allsort (a bottom bait) and added a small pellet cone of soaked 2mm pellets bound with some Sonubaits Stiki Pellet powder. Sadly another 15 minutes ticked by without any action, so with half an hour gone it was time for plan B! (On the plus side the only person to have caught a carp on my lake by this point was Brian Stevens one of the middle pegs on the far bank – as far as I could tell none of the fancied corner pegs had yielded early bonus fish.)
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| As close as I ever get to a corner at MBK! |
Even though I intended to target skimmers and other small fish on the pole I had to pay heed to the fact that the lake is full of carp – as a result my pole rig featured a compromise between finesse and reliability: the main line was 0.13 Guru N-Gauge to a hooklength of 0.11 Reflo Power and size 20 Tubertini 808 (which would no doubt be marketed as a size 18 if it was produced by Drennan or Kamasan). The float was a 4x14 KC Carpa Chimp (the best ‘go anywhere, do anything’ pattern ever created) shotted with a bulk at 40cm and 2 number 9 stotz pushed together at 20cm – the rig was set an inch or two overdepth. Things were finished-off with pink Hydrolastic (if I had more top kits I’d fit some with the new, softer yellow Hydro – but more of that later).
The next three hours actually went rather well – as far as I could tell nobody was catching carp and I was managing to maintain a reasonable run of small skimmers on single or double dead red maggot hookbaits. With the help of a small (1lb) carp I’d probably managed the best part of 9 or 10 pounds before the peg really seemed to die at about one thirty …
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| Looking left to John Wilkins on peg 8 |
During the proceeding 3 hours I’d re-fed a couple of times with a small ball of my groundbait mix and always seen an immediate response. However with 90 minutes to go I decided to open a new line with a slightly different plan of attack – as a result I plumbed-up two new rigs for fishing at 13m still but at a 45 degree angle to my left (putting the new swim at about 8-9m directly in front of the vacant peg 7). The first rig (pink Hydro, 0.13 main line, 0.2g SconeZone v8, 0.11 hooklength, size 20 Tubertini 808) was for targeting small fish with expander pellets, the second (blue Hydro, 4x12 KC Carpa Force, 0.15 main line, 0.13 hooklength, size 18 Kamasan B911) was aimed at catching carp on corn.
This new line was fed initially with a sprinkling of micro pellets and 3 grains of corn whilst the original pole line was topped-up with 3 full size balls of groundbait – ‘he who dares Rodney, he who dares …’!!! In order to give these lines time to settle/recover I turned to my tip rod and had a quick cast on the straight lead (no feed) with the 8mm white pop-up boilie rig – a fifteen minute cast saw a tantalising liner, but despite crouching over the rod in intense anticipation it never did slam ‘round with that mystical 20lber on the other end!
A look on the new line with the lighter rig and a 4mm expander failed to produce a bite in the following 5 minutes, so it was back onto the original line to see if any skimmers had returned – luckily a few had and I was able to keep things ticking over to the end of the match with some more small fish. (It is worth noting that the stamp of these fished had diminished dramatically and despite thinking to myself at least 3 times that I should swap to a lighter elastic I continue with the pink Hydro and ended-up bumping as many fish as I landed. I also tried both rigs on the new line a few times but no bites materialised.)
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| Worth the weight (sic)? |
Given that today’s was match was split across 3 different lakes it was decided to structure the pay-out accordingly with prizes for the top two on each lake (but no overall 1, 2, 3). Here are the results …
Pond 2:
- A Clayson (Twyford), 29-5-0
- M Grace (T), 20-13-0
Pond 3:
- P Etherington (Godalming), 24-9-0
- L Prater (T), 13-1-0
Pond 4:
- L Giles (T) & P Morris (G), both 10-7-0
As you can see I managed to tie with Lee Giles for top spot on Pond 4 – agonisingly close to an out-and-out lake win though it is well worth noting that there were other weights of 9-5-0, 10-3-0 and 10-5-0 so it could’ve been a lot worse!!!
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| The final reckoning |
Conclusions: as always in these situations it is very easy to focus I what could’ve been done to put that extra fish in the net. For instance, with hindsight fishing the tip for a total 45 minutes was a waste of time and not doing so would’ve certainly put another 8 ounces to a pound in the net – however on another day the tip could’ve wrapped ‘round three times putting a potential 20lb in the net! However I do regret not scaling down my elastic in the final hour – this was just plain laziness and cost me a lake win!!!
Until next time ...
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