Personally I tend to work away from home quite a bit during the week and I often find that time really drags between Monday morning and Friday afternoon – well the same certainly isn’t true of a week at White Acres! One minute you are queuing to get into the clubhouse for the pre-festival briefing, the next you are putting your hand into the bag of dreams for the fifth and final time!!!
Nice and sunny for the final day
Going into today’s match (the final day of the 2016 Milo festival) I’d managed to recover from Monday’s blow-out and had somehow clawed my way back to be tying on points with my partner in crime Claire ‘Bagger’ Hollis. As if the pressure of vying to be the best angler in your own household wasn’t enough, not only would we end-up drawing in the same sub-section of 9 we’d also end-up fishing next to each other – what were the chances of that?!? (The answer is 1 in 35, but I’m sure you get my meaning …)
Pollawyn is one of the older lakes on the White Acres complex and is home to the famous High Bank, an area known for big bags of large carp that often fall to pellet waggler or straight lead tactics. However, the Match Lake (as it is sometimes known) also includes a number of much narrower arms that are normally devoid of carp and that can be extremely hard work as small silver fish are the more reliable target. Like most people I was therefore hoping for a nice pitch on the High Bank and was extremely disappointed to draw peg 48, a spot at the tackle shop end of the middle arm and as far from the High Bank as it was possible to get!
Having said that, when I actually got to the peg my mood lifted somewhat – festival pegging meant that 48 has 3 spare platforms to one side (the next angler to my right was the afore mentioned Bagger on 52) and the bay formed by pegs 49, 50 and 51 was full of cruising carp, all of which were seemingly sunbathing or getting ready to spawn.
A two Coke's hangover?
My pre-match plan for drawing a peg down the one of the arms focussed on fishing for roach and perch on light rigs in the margins at top kit plus one or two, and on fishing for skimmers into the deeper water straight in front at top kit plus two or three. I set-up rigs to cover these options and as I could access peg 49’s platform I also put together a big fish margin rig in the hope of snaring a barbel or carp later in the match. Due to an overhanging tree I couldn’t cast a feeder or bomb towards the vacant pegs to my right so instead I set-up a long pole mugging/dobbing rig as a few cruisers had started drifting through my peg before the start. This rig consisted of white Hydro, 0.19 Guru N-Gauge main line, a large Preston jigger float fished at a fixed depth of 15” (via the nifty use of some float stops) and a 15cm hooklength of 0.15 into a size 16 LWG (eyed).
Dob, dob, dobbing
In my experience, trying to catch carp that you can actually see is a frustrating waste of time but as the angler on peg 48 yesterday only returned 8lb odd (for decent section points) I decided to give mugging a go as just one or two carp would be a massive bonus. I started on bread but soon switched to a luncheon meat hookbait and in the first 90 minutes I managed five bites – four carp in the net and one length of broken Hydrolastic being the result!!!
Whilst I tried mugging, each and every carp that had my meat wafted past its nose turned away in disgust, the bites that I did muster actually came by flicking (dobbing) my rig into likely looking spots along the far bank without seeing a fish present. It’s also surprisingly difficult to tell which is the head end of a stationary fish at distance and on a number of occasions a fish swam off after I tried to mug it via the tail!
About the only thing that was feeding!
Unfortunately the next two hours were desperately slow – the cruisers disappeared from the peg and I literally couldn’t buy a bite on any of my silvers rigs, despite spending most of the time fishing with a single maggot hookbait. I also tried fishing to peg 49’s platform – this was equally fruitless, but luckily I had those 4 carp in the net and a 16lb cushion on the clicker already secured.
The view to the right
With about 90 minutes to go and nothing to lose I decided to take the time to set-up another rig. This one was for fishing to some rushes at 16m along the far bank to the right and would be a real pain to fish given the steep banking behind my peg and the need to break-down the pole (though in all fairness I was already doing this when fishing 14.5m of pole when mugging/dobbing).
I had intended to fish this with a pole mounted pot but given the angle of the banking I had to revert to feeding via a cupping kit – when reconnecting the two parts of the pole a pole mounted pot would submerge and lose its load but a large cup would stay afloat and cause the top part of the pole to bend instead.
Feel the burn
This made things even harder but was well worth it as I basically caught a fish a bung until the all-out!!! I would fill my cup with some chopped worm and caster, ship-out the first 8m, connect the second 8m of pole, feed, ship back, break-down the pole, ship back the final 8m, attach the top kit with the rig (best hookbait was half a worm), ship-out the first 8m, connect the second 8m of pole, drop the rig in, hook a fish, ship back, break-down the pole, ship back the final 8m, land the fish and repeat!!!
Towards the very end I had a large crowd of spectators (well two people) watching me and they must’ve thought I was a right numpty as by this point I was regretting being an unfit desk jockey as the lactic acid was really building-up in my arms and I could hardly ship in and out and I kept tangling the rig – holding 16m pole over my head was really taking its toll!
Gratuitous photo warning
However the effort was well worth it and in that last 75 minutes I boosted my weight from a decent enough 16lb to a whopping 57-10-0, more that I’d ever imagined catching from a peg down one of the arms on Pollawyn and incredibly this was enough for a section and a lake win to boot!!!
As it turned out I really needed those extra fish as Bagger had returned the best weight of the week from peg 52 (17lb odd, 2lb being the return from the same peg yesterday) and had scored a brilliant 7 points as a result.
Complementary polo
Today’s 9 points meant I’d finish the festival in fifty first place with a total of 28 points (dropping 2) – the same points total as Neil McKinnon, Simon Fry and Nathan Watson – one place behind my drinking buddy Tony Butler and just ahead of Bagger who finished her first 180 peg festival in a brilliant 82nd place. They say that actions speak louder than words, so I’ll finish up by saying that we are already booked onto the 2016 Maver and the 2017 Milo and Guru festivals …
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