All the Gear, No Idea: 28 December 2015, Gold Lake (Gold Valley)

After a self-imposed match fishing hiatus lasting for nearly two months it was finally time to get back into the fray today – and what better way to do so than with the belated Apollo Guildford Match Group Christmas match at Gold Valley?

Red sky in the morning!!!

The View from my Peg (YouTube)

Today’s event was held on the Canal Bank of Gold Lake at Gold Valley and saw a decent turn-out of 19 anglers trying desperately not to catch the resident carp that are the usual target – no, not a bout of collective insanity, but as this match was a silverfish only event catching carp can be rather annoying as they don’t count!!!

My dip into the bag of dreams meant I would be stationed on peg 22 for the day – I was told that this was a pretty decent draw, but as Gold Lake is essentially a large rectangle with just two or three small islands (none of which are anywhere near peg 22) my view was that the recent weather conditions would probably dictate where the best pegs on the day would be as the fish would no doubt be influenced by the wind as much as anything.

Red, white and green

As today’s match was silvers only my bait selection was focused mainly on maggots and Old Ghost Green Alga groundbait, with a small smattering of micro and 4mm expander pellets. In terms of tactics I gave myself four options: a light pole rig for fishing down the edge to my right (towards some dead rushes) with maggots for roach and perch; a rig for fishing the pole with groundbait and pellets at 13m for skimmers; a free-running cage feeder for fishing at 25m (halfway to the central rope); and finally a rod for fishing either a small Guru Method or Hybrid feeder at the same distance as the cage feeder set-up (but in a slightly more positive/modern way).

Waiting for a pull

On the whistle I fed six decent balls of Green Alga on my 13m line (which with hindsight was a massive mistake), followed by half an hour spent fishing the cage feeder – the set-up here consisted of one of my Daiwa Tournament 10/11 tip rods fished at 11’ (for some reason these rods have softer actions at the longer length, plus casting light feeders becomes easier), 4lb Daiwa Sensor main line (again to aid casting), a 15g Drennan cage feeder attached via a Preston Innovations feeder bead link (which gives a free-running paternoster arrangement), finished-off with 30cm of 0.13 N-Gauge to a size 18 Guru LWG hook. Unfortunately this didn’t lead to any bites – a bit of a worry as I saw this approach as something of a banker!!!

A switch to the margins (where I’d been feeding live maggots by hand since the off) at least saw a few bites and two dumpy roach in the net to get me off the mark – before this line inexplicably died and I couldn’t get another bite from it all day!

Guru Method and Hybrid feeders

A switch back to the 25m line, though this time swapping between a small 24g Guru Method feeder or a small 24g Guru Hybrid feeder loaded with soaked 2mm pellets and a little groundbait, saw four proper pulls and three skimmers in the net – as a result I ended the first half of the match with about 4lb and at least in touch with those around me as nobody really seemed to be bagging-up. (Hooklengths used on the Method/Hybrid feeder were all 10cm of 0.17 N-Gauge to a size 16 QM1 with a hair-rigged pellet band. A 6mm hard pellet was the only hookbait used. I was once again using the Guru X-Safe system, though as I was targeting skimmers I used a short stem fitted with white Hydro.)

Damn - silvers only!!!

After putting those skimmers in the net is fairly quick succession I had assumed that I'd stumbled on the right approach and a few fish, and would go on to win the match in fine style - so obviously the second half of the match turned into a complete disaster with the only bite I could muster coming from a 6lb carp that I had to slip back!!! I did try the 13m pole line a number of times - there was lots of fizzing, but clearly my opening gambit of six balls of groundbait was way, way too much as I couldn't manage a single bite from this line. (With hindsight I would've fed this line with a tiny ball of micro pellets every half an hour and tried to just catch one fish at a time.)