I normally suffer the misfortune of having to work from Monday to Friday so I very rarely get the opportunity to fish mid-week matches - however being the week between Christmas and New Year I was able to get out on the bank today and made my way back to Gold Valley for one of the Wednesday opens.
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| Looking left from peg 25 on Gold Lake |
On Monday's silver fish only event local legend and Barney's Worms head honcho Dave Carter had suffered to the misfortune of hooking carp after carp from peg 4 of the same lake we were fishing today (Gold Lake) so naturally I was looking to draw in this area - so of course I drew peg 25, literally at the other end of the pond!!! Still this peg was apparently in a good area as it appears to be at the crease where the deeper main body of the lake really shallows-up as it approaches the parallel bank that is furthest from the clubhouse.
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| PVA and hard pellets today |
As today's match was an open (where carp definitely counted) I went for a simple, one rod approach that is pretty much the norm at Gold Valley at this time of year. As it seemed like a near 50m chuck to the central dividing rope I decided to make things easy for myself an left my usual 10' tip rod in the bag an instead dug out a 12' Preston Innovations Carbonactive that I carry for such situations - such longer rods can seem a little unwieldy when you are used to fishing with 10' models, but I find the extra casting ability is well worth it.
I also stepped-down my usual 8lb mainline in favour of a lower diameter 6lb breaking strain of my usual brand (Daiwa Sensor), with 3' of 10lb Drennan flurocarbon added loop-to-loop to the end of the mainline ready to take either a 1 ounce Guru inline lead or a 36g small Guru Hybrid feeder (both fitted a with long X-Safe stems with black Hydro). Hooklengths were 30cm of 0.19 N-Gauge with a size 12 QM1 and a hair-rigged pellet band for the lead and 10cm of 0.22 (same hook) for the Hybrid feeder.
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| Shhhh - new top secret hookbaits! |
Even though it has been really rather warm for the time of year (double-figure temperatures today) I decided that I'd feel my way into the match and not actually feed anything during the first hour. This plan seemed to work pretty well as in the first hour I managed to hook two carp in three casts just short of the central rope on the straight lead with a Ringers chocolate orange wafter - unfortunately though only one ended-up in the net as the first one snagged me on an underwater obstacle just 5m or so from the bank and I had to pull for a break. (Both bites came after the rig had been in the water for at least 15 minutes.)
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| A 36g small Guru Hybrid feeder with PVA bag attached |
Going into the second hour the match I decided to risk feeding a little bit of bait and switched to a 36g small Guru Hybrid feeder loaded with a PVA bag of 4 and 6mm hard pellets held in place by a simple loop of black Hydro. This change worked really well and by the end of the first half of the match I was sitting pretty with a tidy total of six carp in the net - again most bites came after 15 minutes or so, but one or two came pretty quickly (just 3 or 4 minutes), and all bites came to the Ringers chocolate orange wafter.
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| Patiently waiting for the rod to fold in half |
Unfortunately the second half of my match so nowhere near as good as the first - a fish that was hooked on the straight lead and an 11mm pellet hookbait fell-off on the way in (though it did give a very funny bite and was probably foul-hooked), and my final carp of the day came at 14:15 (this one fell to the Hybrid feeder arrangement).
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| Nice to end the year with an envelope |
In the end my seven carp went 53-12-0, enough for second in the match behind Gold Valley open match regular (and reigning Garbolino Club Angler of the Year) Stefan Gent who put seventy plus pounds on the scales from a peg towards the middle of the lake. So a good end to 2015 and hopefully a sign of things to come in 2016!!!
Until next time ...
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