One of the great things about any fishing festival is that by fishing for four or five days in a row you soon get the chance to redeem a blow-out – as my first day of the 2016 Milo festival at White Acres was a complete disaster today’s match couldn’t come around soon enough!!!
Today’s draw offered the choice of three lakes – Acorn (Bagger’s favourite), Canal (Bagger’s nemesis) and the off-site Trewaters (which has two lakes and hosts 2 sections on the 180 peg festivals). As luck would have it we both drew on Trewaters – Bagger on the top lake and myself on peg 47 on the bottom lake. (Don’t worry – we fished on Acorn on Saturday so Bagger has already had her Acorn fix this week.)
Peg 47 is at the back of the bottom lake at Trewaters and is a nice enough looking pitch – every swim at Trewaters has access to a central island but 47 has a nice selection of bays and reed beds, and in my mind at least has a little more room than some of the other pegs.
As I see it there are two main advantages of fishing one of the 180 peg White Acres festivals (as opposed to the smaller festivals such as the Garbolino Spring Classic) – firstly the fishing times of 12:00-17:00 give you a bit of a lie-in and more margin time; and secondly the pegging is normally every other peg. However, as our rotation is two anglers short this week it means that each day two pegs won't be drawn – as luck would have it peg 45 wasn’t drawn today meaning I had a spare peg to my right and a grand total of three spare pegs to my left, very nice!!!
The banker tactic at Trewaters is normally to loose feed pellets tight to the island and fish a method-style feeder over the top for the resident carp and F1s. As I had plenty of room today I actually set-up two tip rods – one clipped-up to fish to the left and right of some reeds that were pretty much directly across from my platform, and another to fish into a small bay further to the left. As there were clearly a few fish moving around the island I decided to start on the bomb & bread before actually feeding anything – despite rotating through my three different lines (and expecting instant action) the first twenty minutes or so only produced one carp and one small F1 so it was soon out with the catapult and the battering of the island with White Acres 6mm pellets was soon underway.
The gist of my approach now was to only catapult pellets to the spot just to the left of the central rushes but to rotate around all three spots with a 24g Guru Hybrid feeder in a very regimented fashion. I would cast to a given spot and leave the feeder in for a maximum of 90 seconds – if I had a proper pull or a liner from that spot I would cast there again, but if not I would move along to the next line, and so on and so on. This worked to a certain extent, though two things soon became apparent – the line where I was catapulting pellets produced very little and it was very, very difficult to get two bites in a row from the same spot!!!
After two hours and with just 20lb on the clicker I decided that there were fish hanging around the island but they weren’t too interested in feeding and hence it was time to look elsewhere (I don’t think that fishing the feeder was the problem either as the guys to my left and right had both fished with a long lining swinger rig to the island on the pole and had probably caught less than I had by this point).
I did have a little dabble on the 5m line that I had been drip feeding with 6mm meat, but as soon as I saw that a carp or two had instantly moved over the two pots of groundbait that I’d fed into 15 inches of water to my left at top kit plus two I knew I’d only be fishing in one fashion for the remainder of the match!!!
By the end of the session I’d actually opened a total of five different margin swims – that line to the left at top kit plus two, followed by lines at top kit plus two the right, top kit plus three left, top kit plus three right and finally top kit plus four left. I felt I had to do this (as unlike the anglers to my left and right, who both battered me with over 100lb each) I had no cover in my margins and hence the fish wouldn’t really settle in one spot for very long.
In the end my fish weighed 54-12-0, good enough for fourth in section (6 points) – not a spectacular weight and miles behind the 87-10-0, 110-1-0 and 112-4-0 that formed the top 3, but much better than yesterday!!! (As a result I've moved-up to a mighty 119th place!)
Interestingly I scaled-down my gear from yesterday and fished with 0.15 mainline and an 0.13 hooklength in the margins. Despite hooking into some pretty decent fish I only lost two – one that I allowed to swim under my platform and one that was probably foul-hooked and would’ve be hard to land on 0.19 or 0.22. Food for thought anyway!!!
Until tomorrow …
 |
| Always nice to wake-up to a view of Jenny's |
Today’s draw offered the choice of three lakes – Acorn (Bagger’s favourite), Canal (Bagger’s nemesis) and the off-site Trewaters (which has two lakes and hosts 2 sections on the 180 peg festivals). As luck would have it we both drew on Trewaters – Bagger on the top lake and myself on peg 47 on the bottom lake. (Don’t worry – we fished on Acorn on Saturday so Bagger has already had her Acorn fix this week.)
 |
| Plenty of room to the left!!! |
Peg 47 is at the back of the bottom lake at Trewaters and is a nice enough looking pitch – every swim at Trewaters has access to a central island but 47 has a nice selection of bays and reed beds, and in my mind at least has a little more room than some of the other pegs.
 |
| Day two pegging |
As I see it there are two main advantages of fishing one of the 180 peg White Acres festivals (as opposed to the smaller festivals such as the Garbolino Spring Classic) – firstly the fishing times of 12:00-17:00 give you a bit of a lie-in and more margin time; and secondly the pegging is normally every other peg. However, as our rotation is two anglers short this week it means that each day two pegs won't be drawn – as luck would have it peg 45 wasn’t drawn today meaning I had a spare peg to my right and a grand total of three spare pegs to my left, very nice!!!
 |
| The view from the car park |
The banker tactic at Trewaters is normally to loose feed pellets tight to the island and fish a method-style feeder over the top for the resident carp and F1s. As I had plenty of room today I actually set-up two tip rods – one clipped-up to fish to the left and right of some reeds that were pretty much directly across from my platform, and another to fish into a small bay further to the left. As there were clearly a few fish moving around the island I decided to start on the bomb & bread before actually feeding anything – despite rotating through my three different lines (and expecting instant action) the first twenty minutes or so only produced one carp and one small F1 so it was soon out with the catapult and the battering of the island with White Acres 6mm pellets was soon underway.
The gist of my approach now was to only catapult pellets to the spot just to the left of the central rushes but to rotate around all three spots with a 24g Guru Hybrid feeder in a very regimented fashion. I would cast to a given spot and leave the feeder in for a maximum of 90 seconds – if I had a proper pull or a liner from that spot I would cast there again, but if not I would move along to the next line, and so on and so on. This worked to a certain extent, though two things soon became apparent – the line where I was catapulting pellets produced very little and it was very, very difficult to get two bites in a row from the same spot!!!
 |
| Carl Willims on 43 |
After two hours and with just 20lb on the clicker I decided that there were fish hanging around the island but they weren’t too interested in feeding and hence it was time to look elsewhere (I don’t think that fishing the feeder was the problem either as the guys to my left and right had both fished with a long lining swinger rig to the island on the pole and had probably caught less than I had by this point).
I did have a little dabble on the 5m line that I had been drip feeding with 6mm meat, but as soon as I saw that a carp or two had instantly moved over the two pots of groundbait that I’d fed into 15 inches of water to my left at top kit plus two I knew I’d only be fishing in one fashion for the remainder of the match!!!
By the end of the session I’d actually opened a total of five different margin swims – that line to the left at top kit plus two, followed by lines at top kit plus two the right, top kit plus three left, top kit plus three right and finally top kit plus four left. I felt I had to do this (as unlike the anglers to my left and right, who both battered me with over 100lb each) I had no cover in my margins and hence the fish wouldn’t really settle in one spot for very long.
 |
| Ever get the feeling that somebody is watching you? |
In the end my fish weighed 54-12-0, good enough for fourth in section (6 points) – not a spectacular weight and miles behind the 87-10-0, 110-1-0 and 112-4-0 that formed the top 3, but much better than yesterday!!! (As a result I've moved-up to a mighty 119th place!)
Interestingly I scaled-down my gear from yesterday and fished with 0.15 mainline and an 0.13 hooklength in the margins. Despite hooking into some pretty decent fish I only lost two – one that I allowed to swim under my platform and one that was probably foul-hooked and would’ve be hard to land on 0.19 or 0.22. Food for thought anyway!!!
Until tomorrow …
No comments:
Post a Comment