26/05/13 - Acorns - Paddock

Weight - 48lb 8oz
Catch - 23 Carp, 3 Tench, 1 F1, 1 Perch
Weather - Warm & sunny!
Match - Pole Only Series - rd6 - 19th out of 32, 4th out of 8 section.

Well regular readers noticed I hadn't blogged about round 5 of this series and I promptly received some stick at the draw, about you cant blog only about the good days, etc, etc. Fair enough and normally I do, but on this occasion, the wind buggered up the fishing and I was left a little fed-up. Peg 3 on the small lake, I decided to target the silvers, but presentation was difficult, combined with lost/bumped fish meant I only weighed 14lb 8oz of skimmers with a few carp. Very frustrating.

Back to today and I wasn't really looking forward it. I just wanted this series to end, because it has been really poor for me.

Peg 22 was OK, which offered a chance of a section pick up, but unlikely to frame. For company I had Eddie Wynn on the other side of the bridge and Lewis Jones to my left on p23 who was in the next section.

Well it made a nice change to be fishing in the sun. No thermals, no wind, no ice, something had to go wrong. With John Bradford (p13) and Kev Perry (p15) likely to target silvers, I didn't think there was any point targeting them from this peg, so only a couple carp rigs were set up.

- HB Billybob 0.1g > .14 > 16 B911 - expander/meat - across to the island
- HB Redneck 0.3g > .17 > 12 carp feeder - paste
- HB rat catcher 2 > .16 > 16 B911 - hair rig pellet

With the warm weather I didn't expect too much to be caught down the track, however from the start I fed 6mm pellet at 5m in the hope of catch a few carp late on paste.

On the all-in I started by the bridge toss potting 4s with either 4 or 6mm expander on the hook. By the end of the first hour I had a small tench and 6 carp, which was a good start, but the issue with these bridge pegs is the size of the carp, which tend to be on the small side. With that in mind I kept feeding the 5m line and had been catapulting 6s slightly to my left by the island where it was much shallower, however I struggled to get a proper bite on pellet.

Having rested the bridge swim, I kept catching on the expander, before it slowed down again. In an effort to refresh the swim I started to feed meat and I had a another run of fish, including a decent tench.

Despite catapulting feed to the left hand swim I was really struggling to get a proper bite, whilst Lewis was catching most put ins. Speaking to him afterwards he said there was quite a few fish between him and Jason Radford who was 2 pegs down.

I decided to set up a paste rig to fish against the island and soon had 3 carp, which were a bigger stamp than those from the bridge.

With 1hr 15mins to go I was up to 20 carp and decided to put in my 3rd net, not because I was near the 70lb limit, but knew I would be close to 40-50lb and if I kept going at the rate was I catching 60-70lb was likely. The 3rd net syndrome kicked in big time, were I didn't catch for an hour. From those I could see I thought I was doing OK, it looked like Tom Thick on p18 had the section sewed up, but 2nd place was up for grabs. I had seen Bob Gullick on p16 catching & walking around, Glen Bailey was catching a few and I was fairly sure I was ahead of Eddie.

However that hour blank spell cost me 2nd place in section. Initially I couldn't get a bite on paste, then I lost a fish, I couldn't get the paste rig to settle properly and I even managed to get my hook wrapped around the elastic on the catapult and started shipping that out. All the time Eddie & Glen in particular were catching, whilst I disengaged my brain and fished like a muppet. With my head up my arse, I forgot to do the things I had been doing, but after calming myself down, I caught 3 carp in the last 15mins. I only needed 2, maybe 3 carp during that blank hour spell to have claimed 2nd in section from Bob Gullick who weighed 52-4.

Congratulations to those who picked up in the league, I will fish next year and hope the weather gods are kinder.

1st 112-15 - Brian Slipper - p33
2nd 112- 3 - Pete Bartlett - p9
3rd 108-14 - Lewis Jones - p23
4th 99-15 - Tony Rixon - p1
5th 87-12 - Tim Ford - p8
6th 87-12 - Tom Thick - p18

Silvers
1st 34- 4 - Paul Faires - p3 - top lake
2nd 21- 4 - Glenn Calvert - p30
2nd 21- 4 - Russ Peck - p8 - top lake