Well, all the ice has gone so hopefully we'll be able to catch a few fish now, well, that was the plan. With the Winter League starting next week the turnout was a bit better than of recent so some pegs around the island were in which have been left out in recent weeks. I was reasonably happy with my draw, peg 44. It's perhaps not the best cold weather peg but with the peg opposite not in and with someone on the next peg who wasn't going to fill it in on the next peg I fancied it for a fish or two.
Main plan was to start on the lead away from the small island while feeding two pole swims as I've found the pole is a slow starter on this peg in the past. My first pole swim was at 13m towards the small island, not too close to it as the bottom is a bit up and down and the water was a little clearer after the lake has been frozen. Depth was about 4ft here. The rig for this was a .3gr DC6 to an 18 hook on .12 line. At about 8m I put a rig up to fish toward where the big lilly bed is in the summer, although dragging the plummet around I couldn't find any remains of it! Rig for here was on the same line as the other, but with a larger size 16 hook as I intended to fish corn here. Float was a more stable DC11 in just over 5ft of water here. Lakky on both was a 13h. As per usual with the bomb I had loads of different length hook lengths to try with both bread and corn. I did intend to try a tea-bag on it if the lead didn't work but I forgot to pick up my PVA from my carp bucket!
At the whistle the farthest line was fed with four maggots and four casters while the deeper line had a small pinch of casters and three grains of corn. The first few chucks on the lead and bread were fruitless, as was the third chuck on corn. The pole proved just as lifeless but it was the same for everyone until two people lost carp shortly after. On the hour and a half mark I struck at what I thought was a twitch and missed it, cursing out loud as I did saying I bet it was my only bite, and guess what? It was!
To cut a long and boring story short nothing worked and I blanked like seven of the thirteen anglers on the lake! I couldn't even get one of last weeks micro roach which I would have gone for if I had any marginal cover. Only one angler had a carp in the open water part of the lake, one of the two in the reeds had a carp (the other blanked, even though there were fish in the reeds) and the match was won with two carp for 8-12 and only five carp in total were caught. Fair to say the weather has knocked it on the head then! There were anglers on the other lake practising for a Supercup match and they all caught I believe so the first round of the Winter League has been changed to Lake 1, as it originally would have been last week had it not been froze off! I'll tell you about it next week!
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