After a couple of weeks of less than average weather, today’s forecast was for temperatures into the mid-twenties and clear blue skies. Some might disagree, but personally I think that spending such a day fishing a match at the lovely Willinghurst Fishery is hard to beat ...
Nice day for it
Today’s match was supposed to be on Old Lake and New Lake only, but due to high demand Horseshoe Lake was also added into the mix at the last minute. Before the draw the café was full of the usual venue experts and Daiwa Dorking regulars (Paul Holland, Stevie Gardener, etc) all looking for the two vital ingredients of any successful match day – a nice breakfast and a flyer of a draw!
Having only fished New and Horseshoe Lakes once each I was hoping for a pitch on my usual haunt (Old Lake) and this is exactly what I got in the form of peg 22. Regular readers of this blog will know that there is a central, shallow bar running through the length of the lake. Well now having drawn on the far side of Old Lake I can confirm that the bar is shallow but it certainly isn’t central – the posts marking the end of the bar are much, much closer to the far bank than to the pegs on the café side of the lake. (This sounds very boring but there is an interesting point coming later …)
Otherwise peg 22 is like any typical Old Lake pitch with reeds in the margin and peg 21’s (vacant) platform accessible at top kit plus four to the right. However the most striking thing about the peg today was the quality of angler I could see from it! I had venue experts John Radford (24) and Mick Keeper (26) to my left, local legend Paul ‘Tommy’ Hiller (1) diagonally across the lake in the corner, Preston Innovations Delcac angler Jamie Granger (5) directly opposite and more superstars in the form of Marcus Page (9), Ian ‘Dicko’ Dixon (11) and Claire ‘Bagger’ Hollis (13) in the narrower (single banked) part of the lake. Ouch!!!
All the gear ...
Prior to the all-in I set-up rigs/rods to cover the following options: an 11’ Daiwa Tournament waggler rod for fishing with a loaded 4.5g Drennan Pellet Waggler (main line was 6lb Guru Pulse and the hooklength consisted of 0.17 N-Gauge into a size 18 Guru Peller Waggler hook – though I would later change this to 0.19 and a size 16 MWG); a 10’ Daiwa Tournament tip rod for fishing with various Guru X-Safe devices (mainly a 19g in-line bomb and a 24g mini Hybrid feeder); a rig for fishing into the deeper water in front of peg 21 (black Hydro, 0.17, 4x14 Roob, 0.13, size 16 LWG); and finally a bagging rig for margin fishing directly in front of peg 21’s platform (read Hydro, 0.19 straight through to a size 14 MWG, 0.3 SconeZone V6).
Off to a slow start
Still being a relative newcomer to fishing at Willinghurst I basically decided to spend the first half an hour or so watching everybody else! I thought that the best way of doing this whilst still actually fishing myself was to fish on the tip so I did so with a Hybrid feeder loaded with micro pellets and a 6mm hard pellet hookbait cast onto the bar (main line was 8lb Daiwa Sensor with a 3’ leader of 10lb Drennan fluorocarbon, the hooklength was 0.17 into a size 16 QM1). Personally I never had a bite during this period and nor did anybody else – apart from Bagger who paralysed the early stages with a good run of carp on the pellet waggler!!!
Playing a carp on the waggler
As the match progressed a few others also started snaring the odd carp on the waggler so I followed suit. By the end of the first 90 minutes I was still in touch with most of the field as I’d managed two bites and two 4lb carp on my pellet waggler set-up, though with hindsight this was probably the wrong tactic – I say that because of the position of the shallow bar relative to my peg. Because the shallow bar was fairly close (22-25m) it was at the distance you can naturally fire 8mm pellets to and hence it coincided with the normal range of the pellet waggler. As a result I end-up either fishing onto the bar itself or fishing just past it – neither being ideal as the bar was far too shallow to fish a float over and by going past the bar I had to bring any hooked fish up and over it, plus I was in danger of encroaching on the imaginary halfway dividing line and fishing in Jamie Granger’s swim.
Old skool
Despite those two carp, sport was pretty slow so I decided to set-up another approach at around 12:30 (Willinghurst open matches are fished from 10:30 to 16:30). This is an approach that I’d had at the back of my mind for a while and is something of a return to the ‘old skool’ – basically it consisted of a small free-running 20g Drennan groundbait feeder (the green plastic ones) with a 2’ tail of 0.17 to a size 16 MWG for fishing with bunches of dead red maggots.
The idea was to draw a number of carp into the swim with regular deposits of groundbait and dead red maggots and to induce them into taking the hookbait on the drop as it fell through the water. During the half an hour or so that I fished the tactic it sort of worked and it sort of didn’t – I didn’t get any bites from carp but I did land three nice skimmers that must’ve weighed the same as my two carp!
However when bites slowed I (mistakenly with hindsight) decided to switch back to the waggler as others were catching on it and I was falling further and further behind – this was a massive mistake as I would basically go for the best part of three hours without putting anything in the net!!!
Straight lead gear
It’s fair to say that going into the final 90 minutes I was getting pretty cheesed-off with my performance and lack of fishy action on the waggler so I settled into a strict regime of spending five minutes on the bar with the bomb & pellet, followed by 5 minutes on the 5m line, followed by 5 minutes in the margins. After a further 30 minutes with no bites I was seriously considering packing-up (or at best fishing to the end and not weighing in) when all hell broke loose and it suddenly became a fish a bung on the bomb & pellet on the bar!
I literally couldn’t get in and out quick enough as every time I cast onto the bar and unleashed a barrage of pellets over the top the tip would slam ‘round as another carp consumed my 8mm Ringers pellet wafter hookbait. (Rather than mount them via a band I drill them and mount them lengthways on a hair rig with a boilie stop.) I lost count of how many I landed but I definitely lost 3 – one broke my 0.17 hooklength (which I should’ve upgraded to 0.19 or even 0.22) and two came off because I was pulling too hard (the thing I’m always telling others not to do). In fact when I pulled-out of the second I unleashed a ‘C-bomb’ across the lake in disgust so sorry about that.
Tommy and Jamie on the scales
In the end I must’ve landed 50lb in the final hour as I went from having 16lb on the clicker to weighing-in 66-8-0, much more than I’d thought and agonisingly just OOotM (one out of the money)!!!
As you can see from the following Bagger continued her great recent form to finish-up third on the lake, not that far behind Ian and Tommy:
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