17/10/09 - Lands End - Match Lake

Weight – 56lb 3oz
Catch – 12 Carp, 3 Perch, 2 Chub, 2 Tench, 1 Bream
Weather –Cold start, mostly sunny with cloudy periods
Water Temp– 12.5c > 12.0c
Match – Open – 2nd overall

Peg 11 found its way in my hand again and again Mike was opposite me on peg 13! What are the chances? However it has been 1 of the form pegs recently so I wasn’t too disappointed.

On the all in I potted some caster & pellet into the margins of peg 12 as a back up and catapulted 4mm to my left at the bottom of the track in front of peg 10. My main swim would be 14m in front at the bottom of the shelf.

1st put in, feeding 4mm’s & corn via a tosspot, with corn on the hook, I landed my 1st carp. The next 2 put ins the same thing happened, but now I was getting liners and foul hooking.

A brief look down peg 12 margin, to let the carp settle produced a couple of perch, but I wasn’t catching quickly, so back to the main swim.

The 1st half of the match produced 10 carp on corn, soft pellet and hair rigged 6mm, but liners and foulhooked fish was a constant problem. Mike drew here on Wednesday and experienced the same problem. A brief try up the shelf didn’t produce a bite, although there was fish moving around, but I think the carp were spooked by the pole, despite fishing a long line.

The 2nd half of the match was extremely frustrating. If I wasn’t foul hooking fish, I was losing fish to underwater snags! The 1st dived for the island and Mike thinks is it got caught in some hay bale netting, the 2nd snag was only 8m out down the track and the 3rd dived between my keepnets, wrapping itself around the platform. Not happy, toys came out the pram and I may have expressed myself loud enough for everyone to hear much to everyone else’s amusement.

Most of my fish came from the 14m line, with a couple coming from in front of peg 10. I tried the margins and set up a new line in front of the aerator, but only caught silvers.

When the match finished I suspected I may be lucky to finish 2nd, because I could hear Garry on peg 16 catching strongly late on. Rod was 1st to weigh from peg 1 with 54lb and finished 3rd overall. Garry won the match with 72lb and to be honest I was relieved to finish 2nd and 7lb of silvers proved very useful.