If I was being honest I’d say that last of my most memorable matches have been down in Cornwall at White Acres – mainly on Acorn, Twin Oaks and Bolingey. However the annual Angling Times Supercup has provided some noteworthy days over the years – mostly for the wrong reasons (Bough Beech – I hate long distance feeder fishing; Moor House Farm – frozen solid and all the fish at either end of the lake with me right in the middle; Wood Lane Fisheries – does a fishing venue really need to be that deep?) and in 12 attempts my Godalming Midweekers/Apollo Godalming team has been knocked-out in the first round every time!!!
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| Welcome to Woodpeckers |
This year’s draw once again saw us handed an away fixture – the 2015 campaign was to start against a team from Warlingham & District Anglers’ Society, a club well known to most of the Godalming AS regulars as for a few years we fished together on jollies to Monk Lakes.
Being the home team Warlingham had the choice of venue and they decided to take us to Woodpeckers Fishery near Crawley in West Sussex – none of my Apollo Godalming team mates or myself had been there before but word on the grapevine was that the place was fishing hard with recent matches won with as little as 17lb, hardly prolific for a venue that is apparently "very well stocked with a large selection of species"!
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| Looking left from peg 21 |
The venue itself (there are 3 or 4 lakes onsite) was quite a pretty place, the lake we were on (Woodpeckers Lake) having about 30 pegs and lots of features such as islands, overhanging trees and reed beds.
My draw saw me on permanent peg 21 – a very fishy looking spot at the top end of the lake with a nice chuck to an island (with a fallen tree in the water), another fallen tree to the left and plenty of room to the right with some of last year’s reeds still visible.
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| Will a fluorocarbon leader make a difference? |
Before the all-in I prepared two rigs – the first being a 24g Guru pellet feeder (featuring the X-Safe system as opposed to my usual free-running set-up) with a 3 foot leader of 10lb (0.30) Drennan Supplex fluorocarbon above it and 10cm hooklength of 0.22 N-Gauge to either a size 14 or a size 16 QM1 and a hair-rigged band below it. (Previously I’ve always stuck with free-running method/pellet feeder approaches – however it appears that venues such as White Acres and Gold Valley are now allowing the use of the Guru X-Safe system so I wanted to try this out alongside the use of fast sinking fluorocarbon that is said to partially disguise what can be fairly crude feeders.)
The second rig was for the pole at 13m slightly to the left – as this approach was aimed at skimmers it was based around yellow Hydro, 0.13 mainline, a 0.2g SconeZone v8 and a 15cm hooklength of 0.10 to a size 18 Tubertini 808. Plumbing-up revealed that the lake was shallow (2.5-3 feet) and silty.
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| A dabble on the long pole ... |
I kicked-off my match by feeding a reasonable amount of soaked micros, 4mm expanders and dead red maggots on my 13m pole line and spent half an hour on the pellet feeder towards the island directly opposite. Despite looking amazingly fishy this didn’t even yield the slightest of liners, so it was soon over to the pole – hardly bagging, but a couple of small skimmers at least got me off the mark on what was already looking like a hard day for most.
At the start of the second hour I did see a massive bow wave over the spot where I’d been casting the feeder so as the pole line was still mighty slow I decided to switch back to the feeder and started pinging 8mm pellets over the top. This did eventually lead to a convincing pull that was actually a massive liner, but even though I tried swapping my pellet feeder for an inline Guru lead with a 12 inch tail (in case the fish were shying away from the feeder) I failed to actually hook any carp.
As it was looking increasingly unlikely that the pellet feeder was going to be at all productive I found a spot on the 13m pole to the right of my initial line that had the same depth as my existing rig and fed 3 balls of Old Ghost Green Alga – hopefully this would act as a positive plan B whilst I continued to winkle-out a few more skimmers on the negatively fed line.
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| A tasty looking margin to the right! |
The positively fed pole line was soon doing the business and the third hour of the match saw a good run of reasonable skimmers and two very welcome carp – virtually every fish falling to a single white maggot, red maggots and 4mm expanders being completely ignored. Unfortunately I also lost two more good fish (probably carp) – whilst yellow Hydro is an amazingly good elastic for skimmers and the odd better fish, there are times when decent fish will run you ragged on it, but as I was fishing a team match for mainly small fish I was reluctant to upgrade to anything heavier in case I started to bump smaller fish.
Things started to slow considerably going into hour number four, so as I had lots of room and a margin full of features to my right I decided to set-up a rig to target carp close to the bank at top kit plus two – white Hydro, 0.15 mainline, 4x12 KC Carpa Force and a 15cm hooklength of 0.13 to an eyed Guru LWG size 16. At 1345 (we were fishing 1000-1500 today) I fed this line with 3 pots of Green Alga and dead red maggots went back to fishing the feeder – that continued to be a complete waste of time!
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| A last gasp fish from the margins |
I kept my beady eye on the margin line for tell-tale signs of carp but for quite a while there wasn’t the slightest movement so I kept rotating my two 13m pole lines, picking-up a few more skimmers and another bonus carp (once again over the line fed with groundbait).
With fifteen minutes to go I finally saw a tail pattern over my margin line so I was soon in with a nice big worm – the float flew under straight away but unfortunately the culprit was foul-hooked in the left pectoral fin. (I know this because despite taking quarter on an hour to land I eventually got the biggest fish of the day in the net just as the final whistle blew!)
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| Bagger with the clinching section win |
By the time the scales reached my peg my Apollo Godalming team were actually 2-0 up but luckily I was able to do my bit for the team as my 19-8-0 of carp and skimmers were enough to make it 3-0 – the Warlingham angler in the next section (J Gibbon) would make it 3-1, but Bagger was soon on hand to make it 4-1 and give us an unassailable lead. (Colin Underwood would also go on to clinch the final section to make it 5-1.)
Individual top 3:
- J Gibbon, 23-12-0
- C Underwood, 23-0-0
- P Morris, 19-8-0
So after 12 years of hurt the unthinkable has happened – we’re into round two of the Angling Times Supercup 2015!!!
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| Team selfie |
Conclusions: Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to win a few individual matches and do reasonably well in some White Acres festivals – however nothing competes with sharing success with your mates, so I’m pretty sure today is already going to be one of the most memorable of 2015!!!
Until next time …
