I was optimistic of a decent day's fishing today, with a nice warm morning and decent weather forecast too! Hopefully the fish would be obliging....I had a walk around before the draw and there were not many fish visible cruising, hopefully a good sign. Hand in the bag and out comes peg 40, a peg I've never drawn, and to be bluntly honest, one I didn't ever want! There were some mumblings about me drawing it but it's got no form what-so-ever this year. Being drawn out as the golden peg made the mumblers a bit more vocal too!
Sitting down on the peg it's a long way across, 17m or so to the island. I could get about 2ft off the island in about 18in of water, but no tighter due to roots and snags. I thought this could be a problem as I find when fishing to islands you don't want to leave room for carp to get behind the float. Standard rig for here - an Nick Gilbert XTM on .17 to .15 with a size 18 Fox Series 2 matched to Preston 15h. Second up was a 2+2 line fished to my left past the point I was fishing on. A .3gr Nick Gilbert Decker float was on the same terminal gear as the far bank rig, fished in about 6ft of water. Last up was a margin rig for the right side. I had to spend a while plumbing along here. In the end it was a touch closer to me than I wanted but the bottom had a better slope. The rig was a bit lighter than my standard margin gear in an attempt to get bites as the margins have been poor on this lake. Float was a .2gr DC5 in just over 2ft of water, terminal gear was the same as the other rigs.
On the whistle I fed a pinch of pellets across, while the 2+2 line had a third of a pot of hemp and corn. I decided to leave feeding the margins till later but had knocked up some groundbait to try feeding down the edge, being as my normal approaches hadn't worked and it seems to be the 'in' way of fishing the edge.
Trying a 6mm expander across gave nothing after ten minutes so I started to to tap in a few pellets via a toss-pot. I didn't want to feed with the catty across due to the water behind the float - I didn't want to feed the fish in to the roots. It took half an hour or so before my first indication, which I missed! I suspect it was a liner anyhow.
On the hour mark I decided to start introducing a few casters and a bit of crumb across via the pot. The only person I could see who'd caught was peg 33 and nobody else was getting bites. It took until two hours in before I got my first proper bite, a small perch on double caster!
On the half way mark peg 37 had a carp and 33 was still nabbing odd fish, and with the far side lifeless I decided to feed crumb down the edge, giving it two pots with a few small cubes of meat in. This was going to get another whole pot every thirty minutes in the hope of dragging some life in to the swim!
With two hours to go I saw odd signs of life across, and lowering the rig in saw the elastic streaming out. What I thought was a good fish turned out to be about 4lb and foul-hooked in the tail. How did it do that?
The next two hours was totally lifeless where ever I tried, and with the sun in my eyes fishing across (the picture is from after the match as I was ages getting ready) so in the last forty minutes I plugged away down the edge. With half an hour to go I had a liner down the edge, and with just a few minutes to go I could see a large mirror easily into double figures mooching over the groundbait. It wasn't really troughing though and despite my best attempts to trick it, it wasn't interested in either the large dendrobena or a couple of small cubes of meat and I finished the match with my one foul-hooker!
The front side of the lake where I was fished hard for everyone (one carp to my right and none to my left). the weights were close with the top three separated by not much more than 2lb, with just 31lb 14oz needed to win. Next week is back on the old lake, and hopefully it'll be much better!
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