15/10/11 - Fishponds

Weight – 123lb 0oz
Catch – 17 Carp.
Weather – Mild, flat calm
Match – Club – 2nd out of 8

Today was the last Saturday club match, as well as the 9th of 2011 at our club water. Despite missing 1 match I was only 3pts behind Andy for the lake championship, thanks to 5 wins.

With the flat conditions and no ripple anywhere, I didn’t fancy it for shallow fishing, so decided paste would be the best way to go, however with the cool overnight conditions I also set up a 0.5g hillbilly dweezil to fish hair rigged 8mm pellet.

Ideally I would have preferred to have drawn along the long bank, but found myself on p12, which has a long platform out into the lake. Decided on 3 swims, 3o’clock to my right at 8m, 11o’clock at 10m and the left margin.

15mins into the match I already had 2 carp on paste and thought we were on for a really big weight. Unfortunately it didn’t work out like that. Since the start of the match I had been pinging pellet towards the aerator because there was a few fish showing themselves, however I didn’t have any bites on either of the pellet wagglers I had set up. I even tried bread flake, but still no takes. The fish really needed a ripple over their heads to take the bait confidently, so decided not to bother any more with that line.

After an hour I had 4 carp, followed by a further 4 in the 2nd hour, but it was really hard going. Most of the fish came to paste with 1 on pellet. During the 3rd hour it seemed like the lake just switched off, with only 1 more carp, but foul hooked 4.

I kept rotating swims and kept feeding a handful of 8mm pellet into each swim which brought the carp back catching 8 more in the last 2 hours, 6 on paste and 2 on pellet.

I knew I had beaten Andy opposite it was just a question of whether I could beat him by more than 3 places. Judging by all the splashing I could hear from Glenn on peg 15 I suspected he had beaten me, which he duly did. Fortunately I just beat Roger & Chris, which meant I tied with Andy for the lake championship on points, but courtesy of more wins won the series.

1st 165lb – Glenn – p15
2nd 123lb – Ken – p12
3rd 114lb – Roger – p1
4th 106lb – Chris – p3