I'll apologise for not mentioning last week that I wouldn't be out until the Monday - I totally forgot it was a Bank Holiday weekend! Normally the procedure for the blind pairs is a random draw over both lakes, with the pegs from one lake being drawn against the others. With just sixteen anglers down this year, and the old lake not fishing very well the decision this year was made to have everybody on the new lake. While I can understand that, it did mean that one or two pegs would be in that you I really didn't want to be on.
Come the draw and my hand dips in and out comes peg 2 - the shortest walk, and one of the pegs I really didn't want to be on! The owner feeds the carp here (well, peg 1 in the bay to my right), but from past experience when a peg is in here the fish don't stay. Everyone walks past the peg which isn't great, most keep their distance, while one idiot did insist on keep walking past and even standing in peg 1 once he was ready (and they drew about seven pegs to my right!) It's a shame I didn't have a catapult out, as I could have found a use for those rock hard Ringers 8mm boilies I've had for year in my bag....
As you can see, the bay to my right looked good, and I had one line at 11m along the bank to the corner of peg 1. It was a little over 3ft deep here, deeper than I'd like for a margin but I'd give it a go! I was going to leave it until well in the match to feed here, hoping that fish would feel safe and come back. I had a margin line to my left at 8m where the water was about 2.5ft deep. Both were on Preston 15h elastic matched to .15 hook-links and used NG floats XTM's in .2gr. I also decided on a meat swim at 5m where it was about 6ft deep. I had two reasons for not going longer - I didn't want to stop fish from the open water in front from coming back in to the bay, and also the fact that going much further out the depth drops down to around eight or nine foot! A little too deep for my liking. Last up was a small method feeder to fish to the island, a cast just reachable with my 10ft CarbonActive!
I was getting odd liners from the off on the tip, and after fifteen minutes the rod was round and I was in to my first carp - a small common of about 3lb. The knocks settled off a bit after but returned about twenty minutes later. They carried on until about the hour mark when the rod went round just as I put it down! Another common the spitting image of the first was soon in the net. I began to wonder if the day would be better than I thought when on the next cast the tip went when I still had hold of the rod - not a carp this time, but a skimmer of 2lb 12oz (I know that, cos it was the only fish in that net!)
After that flurry the indications stopped on the tip altogether, so I had a drop at 5m where I had been dripping a bit of meat and I'd seen odd bubbles. I missed the first bite after only a few minutes. The next one I connected with and a fish nodded away like a bream. I carefully shipped back, and as I un-shipped a ghostie of about 5lb surfaced, and then the rig pinged back past me ear! I didn't swear, much!
After the lost fish any signs of life were hard to come by. I don't think it was a coincidence that the bites died as the sun came on to my swim around the large trees behind me. Just after two hours in I was about to drop in down the edge for the first time. I baited up my margin rig with a cube of meat, and then flicked some meat on to the 5m line. As the meat sank there was a large swirl where I'd fed, so I promptly dropped the margin rig in over it, and no sooner than the float settled than the elastic pulled out! The result was a mirror about 4lb.
That proved to be the last action I had, apart from knocking my little radio in the lake! It only needed an hour in the sun to get it to work again mind, and having the Championship play-off to listen to kept me sane with absolutely no signs of life in front of me. I wasn't the only one finding it hard as the peg to my left packed up bite less with an hour or so to go, while the peg nearest to my right had only one small perch. I was the first to weigh (and was on the scales, but it did mean I got to take home dry nets!), and my 12lb odd was about halfway in my section.
The lake was divided in to two sections and when I was drawn with the nearest peg to my right (first and last pegs in our sections) any chance of a result in the pairs was well gone. Especially when the first and second weights on the whole lake drew together! It was a bit of a struggle for everyone with 35lb enough to win. With the heat the fish were looking more like they wanted to spawn (the carp in my pond were chasing when I got home), but with the weather cooling off again it looks like that'll be delayed again. Hopefully, not for much longer!
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