With hindsight I should’ve probably given this match a miss as at the time I’d been suffering with a bad cold for the best part of two weeks – however, having already missed a couple of matches and having spent a good deal of time indoors over Christmas I was keen to get on the bank for some fresh air.
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| All the gear ... |
The weather on the day was amazingly mild – when we left home at 7am the temperature gauge on the van was reading 11 degrees Celsius, an amazing figure for the end of December. Unfortunately, this unseasonable temperature was driven by some really strong south-westerly winds that would make fishing the pole impossible for all but the final half an hour.
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| The usual winter bait options |
Given the warm weather I had thought that the venue was going to fish really well so I settled on a positive plan to alternate between a maggot feeder and a cage feeder at around 14.5m – after all if the wind had allowed it this is where I’d have fished on the pole and as all the others fished to the central rope I’d have this line to myself.
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| The view to the left |
As it happened this plan was fatally flawed as virtually all of the fish that were caught on the day were caught from the middle of the lake (i.e. to the rope) and even when I was able to fish at 13m on the pole in the final half an hour I still couldn’t put anything together despite the fading light levels making for near perfect conditions.
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| Peg 79 today |
The one bite/fish that I did manage came at about 10:45 and gave me real hope that the approach I was following (casting every 2 or 3 minutes in an attempt to drag some fish into the area and stimulate some kind of feeding response) was going to work. However it wasn’t to be though the people around me hardly bagged-up with two or three fish being a typical return.
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| Big sky |
I did fish to the rope for half an hour during the middle of the match but apart from a liner on the first chuck no proper bites materialised. Would I have been better off fishing to the rope all day? Probably. Would it have led to a positive result? Probably not! In the end the floating concrete block moored opposite 75 and 93 acted like a magnet to the fish with the guys on those pegs catching on the feeder all day long and catching more than the rest of us put together, with most of the field really struggling for bites.
Until next time ...
