Time for something different this weekend! Rather than the usual Sunday fishing outing I decided to have a go at one of the Friday evening matches at Marsh Farm, leaving the whole of Saturday and Sunday free for DIY and housework – and if you believe that you’ll believe anything!!!
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| Author selfie |
Over recent years the Apollo Marsh Farm tackle shop has organised the Apollomania series on Friday evening during June and July – however this year has seen a change and instead there have been Friday evening (1800-2100) open matches instead with some pretty big weights of mainly margin caught tench, crucians and skimmers.
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| Richardsons' Lake, peg 11 today |
My home for the evening would be peg 11 on Richardson’s Lake – I can’t remember having drawn this peg before, but essentially it is on the outside of a bend and faces a gap between two of three of the central islands. Normally I’d be quite happy with such a draw as it offers lots of water to go at compared to the average – however today I was a little disappointed as the margins didn’t seem very fishy! To the left a combination of the curvature of the bank and a reed bed meant I could fish no further along than a top kit; to the right I could reach as far as a top kit plus one but a very, very steep slope coming away from the bank meant I had to fish three or four feet from the marginal cover where this initial slope levelled-out.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I normally present an hour-by-hour breakdown of how I ruined yet another flyer – however today I’m going to go tactic-by-tactic, not that I really caught much on the feeder, at top kit plus two or down the edge!!!
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| The view slightly to the left |
Over the years I’ve had my fair share of success on the feeder at Marsh Farm, so even though I aimed to catch on the pole today I had to set one up! The rules at Marsh Farm stipulate running rigs only so I wasn’t able to use any of my now standard Guru X-Safe feeders – instead I reverted back to the old favourite 30g small Preston Innovations pellet feeder and later a 24g Guru method (without the X-Safe system). Regardless it didn’t seem to make any difference as despite fishing the tip for the first 30 minutes and trying it regularly throughout, the only time the tip went ‘round was when a tufty duck bombed my far bank line looking for free pellets!!!
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| The gap between the islands to the right |
My second line was at top kit plus two on the pole straight in front – as I expected the fishing to be good I stepped-up from my usual gear to a 4x12 KC Carpa Force on 0.15 main line to an 0.11 hooklength to a size 18 LWG, elastic being white Hydro. Bait for this approach was loose-fed caster with a tiny amount of 6mm meat – not that it really mattered as all it produced was a raft of tiny roach and just two half decent skimmers!!!
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| I really needed to catch from here!!! |
The third and final line (and the one I really needed to work) was the margins – as mentioned above however neither side was ideal and I ended-up focussing on the right hand side, fishing three or four feet from the bank at the bottom of the top shelf. (As it was still two and a half feet deep here I used the same rig components as for the top kit plus two line.) At this point I’d love to be able to describe how I put together a match winning run of tinca tincas from this edge swim, but the unfortunate reality is that I could only muster three small tench and shed load of weightless micro perch, leaving me with a measly 9-8-0 for third in the match – and that was only because angler number four couldn’t be bothered to weigh-in!!!
Until next time …
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