As I have next week off work as a holiday today’s match will with any luck be the first of 3 in 8 days at my local Marsh Farm – as the weather forecast is pretty good for the time of year I’m ever hopeful of a few pulls!
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| Impressive vapour trails |
Surprising my dip into the bag of dreams yielded the same peg as my last visit to Marsh Farm – peg 8 – so a nice wide peg in the favoured area (at the moment) in front of the on-site tackle shop. However unlike that previous visit today’s weather was pretty good – sunny and fairly windy (but not so strong that holding 13m of pole would be an issue).
Prior to the all-in I prepared 4 set-ups – pole rigs for fishing left and right at 13m, a traditional cage feeder with a long tail (45cm of 0.13 N-Gauge to a size 20 LWG) and a pellet feeder. (As the wind was fairly strong I erred on the side of caution a went with the 30g Preston pellet feeder as opposed to the 20g version that can be more productive in better conditions at Marsh Farm.)
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| Please go ‘round!!! |
On the whistle I fed 4 balls of Old Ghost Green Alga groundbait on my right-hand pole line, one third of a pot of micros on the left-hand line and settled down for some pellet feeder fishing. This led to an early tench, but a lack of further action forced me onto the pole – which wasn’t much better as I finished the first hour with just the one tench and 4 of the smallest roach in the county!
The second and third hours weren’t much better as all I could muster was a solitary skimmer on the cage feeder and a decent bream from the groundbaited pole swim that fell-off for no good reason as I was about to slip the next under it – not something you can normally afford to do at relative hard waters such as Marsh Farm!
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| Fish on! |
Things did though pick-up in the fourth hour as two decent tench found their way to the net courtesy of the pellet feeder – however the action really started to hot up once I started to ping 6mm pellets over the top of my pellet feeder line via a catapult. This simple change saw 6 tench, 2 carp (one of which was a proper munter) and a crucian landed in the final 90 minutes (today’s match was fished 1000 to 1530) – a proper bag-up session by Marsh Farm standards!
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| Dave Ewing Snr on the scales |
Whenever I feel I’ve done well I seem to pack-up really quickly and can’t wait for the scales to arrive – though normally I take ages squirrelling my gear away and can’t help but feel a sense of foreboding when the grim reaper appears!
Overall top 4:
- Phil Morris, 40-9-0
- Dave Steer, 26-9-0
- Charlie Salmon, 20-12-0
- Dave Lake, 19-15-0
So in the end something of a struggle turned into a first victory since October 2014 – though in the end the big carp (which went 11-14-0) wasn’t needed as I already had just enough to sneak past the living legend that is Dave Steer.
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| Bosh! |
Conclusions: Over recent weeks I’ve really struggled to catch anything at all on the pellet feeder – something that is tremendously worrying when 99% of your successes in recent seasons has been on that method! Anyway the vast improvement in the weather over recent days seems to have brought the tactic to life, so perhaps 2015 will be a good year after all!!!
Until next time …
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