11/09/11 - Fishponds

Weight – 155lb 2oz
Catch – 19 Carp
Weather – Sunny, with cloudy periods. Gale force winds.
Match – Club – 1st out of 15

15 turned up today which is an awkward number to give everyone plenty of space and invariably end up having to cluster a group of anglers together. I found myself on peg 10, which was nicely sheltered from the wind, but with only a slight ripple I was concerned the fish would have followed the wind on the other side of the lake. On the positive side there tends to be bigger resident fish in the area.

Peg 10 is an end bank peg and is 1 of the deepest on the lake with the margins being 5ft deep and 7-8ft at 10m in front. I knew the pellet waggler was unlikely to work in this part of the lake and decided to target the margins, 8m to my left and 12m to my right, feeding 8mm’s and fishing paste.

During the opening hour I had 2 carp. I had been feeding at 13m to see if I could catch shallow on the pole, but a look over this line after an hour didn’t produce and decided to bin it all together. It was obvious there wasn’t many fish in the area and I felt I needed to fish further out to catch, but was conscience of encroaching on pegs 6 and 12. Fortunately Nick on 6 was fishing the pole and Ian on 12 was catching on the method. After watching where he was casting I had a feel for how far I could cast my method. 1st cast I had a carp and lost one on my 2nd cast, but other than a few liners no other fish after 45mins, so decided to concentrate on margins.

3 hours gone I was up to 6 fish which was on par with those I could see. The remainder of the match was simply a case of catch a carp, feed both margins whilst playing the fish, then switch to the other margin. This continual rotating seemed to be best with the final 3 hours producing a further 13 fish all on paste expect for 1 that I caught on the method, as I had to sort out a spangled rig.

I thought I had 130lb, but a better than average stamp of fish pushed my weight up. Kev (who qualified for the Evesham festival, but unfortunately didn’t draw well on the day) had 20 carp for his 125lb mostly caught on the method.

So that’s 7 pickups in the last 10 matches, framing in the last 3, so a big change around from the beginning of the season.

1st 155- 2 – Ken - p10
2nd 125- 0 – Kev - p17
3rd 96- 6 – Chris - p15
4th 95- 9 - Roger - p22