Even though I use the word ‘today’ a great deal in these blogs they are normally written a few days after the event – for example, as I sit here and type this it’s the Friday after the Sunday, six days since England beat Australia in the rugby and the day after England beat Wales in Euro 2016. Both of these matches saw England roar to victory after falling behind, the complete reverse of my match ‘today’!!!
Gimme shelter
Today’s match (I’ve stopped putting quotes around ‘today’ now) was my fourth in a row at Willinghurst since getting back from the Milo festival at White Acres (where coincidentally we’re returning to next week as Bagger is competing in the Old English festival) and the first for ages to be fished in heavy rain (which I absolutely hate, mainly because I know it takes ages to properly dry two sets of kit).
Despite the rain I managed to draw another flyer again – this time peg 26 on Old Lake. This is just a few pegs along from where I was fishing last week (peg 22) and is one that you have to fancy as it is in a corner with a long, reed lined bank running at right angles to the left. However it is situated past the shallow bar that runs through most of the pegs in the lake so it has deeper water straight in front, the only shallow areas being in the margins.
Keep those pellets dry
My plan of attack was fairly simple – to try and avoid my usual slow start and put a few fish together from the deeper water in the first part of the match before annihilating my competitors in the final 90 minutes with loads of big carp from the long margin.
There’s a nice looking (unused) platform diagonally across from peg 26 and I had planned to fish in front of this with the pole – however on holding 16m of pole it soon became clear that this platform is more like 19 or 20m away. By swinging the pole to the left I could get close to some reeds, but as this wasn’t really that close to the bank (and right in the corner of the lake) I decided to attack the vacant platform with a Hybrid feeder set-up instead.
The view across the lake to the right
The other decision I had to make was how to fish into the deeper water and what bait to use. In my mind the choice was between fishing the pellet waggler with (lighter) Dynamite 8mm pellets or fishing the straight lead with 10mm Ringers pellets (which can be catapulted for miles but sink like stones). Rightly or wrongly I went for the latter, my feeling being that the heavy rain would force the fish closer to the bottom, meaning that the straight lead was the way to go.
Pemb on peg 5
The first four hours of the match actually went quite well – I managed 9 or 10 pulls on the tip, 2 fish on the pellet waggler (one foul hooked in the dorsal fin) and a diddly (1lb) carp on the Hybrid feeder from the platform. Sport was hardly hectic though – some of the bites on the straight lead only materialised after the hookbait (a 10mm Ringers chocolate orange wafter mounted on a 10mm hair attached to a size 12 QM1 on 0.17 or 0.19 Guru N-Gauge) had been in the water for ten to twelve minutes.
At this point I was probably winning the lake – nobody was catching with any regularity and even Guru-backed superstar angler Pemb Wrighting on peg 5 opposite was struggling to catch on the pellet waggler. (Though Pemb was just about to start feeding his edge swims with meat and groundbait – more on that later.)
The area I'd hoped to catch from
In recent weeks I’d caught most of my weight in the final 90 minutes, so going into the closing two hours I was confident of a good result as I’d been pinging pellets across to the adjacent platform and I was starting to see movement – at one stage a carp even waved its tail at me!
However it wasn’t to be – I kept feeding and dropping next to the platform with my mini Hybrid feeder but I despite my best efforts I just couldn’t induce a pull. I continued to fish and feed the longer line into the deeper water and probably caught another 8 or so fish on the straight lead but the size of fish kept getting smaller and smaller. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Pemb bagging from his edge lines – his fish kept getting bigger and bigger!!!
19 carp and this Bertie
In the end my 20 fish went 74-15-0. This was rather disappointing as at venues such as Willinghurst 20 fish normally gets you over the magical tonne barrier – to put things into perspective Pemb’s 16 or 17 fish were enough to win the match as they went well over 120lb.
The thing that I found most interesting though is that last week I weighed less (66lb) and lost 3 or 4 fish and this week I weighed more and didn’t lose a fish all day – despite this I was buzzing last week (as I had a very slow start and nearly got into the money with a great last hour) and this week I went home gutted as I’d put myself into a good position and blew it at the end. That’s fishing I guess!!!
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