16/10/11 - Lands End - Speci Lake

Weight – 45lb 1oz
Catch – 6 Carp, 15 Roach, 3 Perch, 1 Rudd.
Weather – Cool overnight, bright with a slight breeze.
Match – Teams of 4 – 13th out of 44 – 3rd out of 11 section

I was asked by Tony to guest for Avon Angling today, ignoring the comment about being desperate! However I was looking forward to the match, because it been a while since I fished a league match and wanted to do well.

So I was really disappointed to be handed peg 29 on speci lake, a) its 16m to the island and I didn’t fancy fishing long with my back problems at the moment, b) if you draw speci you need to draw either of the corners or the points of the island and c) these middle pegs normally come bottom of the section.

The only consolation was I had a spare peg either side, so at least I had plenty of room and occasionally it does throw up a weight of skimmers, but with the bright flat conditions I wasn’t expecting many to show.

Some micros & 4mm’s were cupped in at 13m to my left and started to catapult 4mm’s 13m to my right. Decided to start fishing caster to the far bank, feeding caster with some chopped worm and predator plus. After 45mins I only had a couple of small roach, bumping a couple of perch, but generally surprised by the lack of response.

I had already topped up the left 13m swim, but again only small roach showed on 4mm expander, so with an hour gone I barely had a pound in the net. Steve Seagar on p27 had a run of decent silvers at 6m and Andy Lloyd was foul hooking plenty of fish on p31 from the point of the island.

I persevered with the left 13m swim, but now started feeding my margins with caster as well as pinging 4mm’s to the island. The LH swim had completely died and a look over the RH 13m swim didn’t yield anything. In fact I couldn’t get a bite on maggot, so real struggling. Steve in the meantime was plundering his margin of chub and Andy had stopped getting any indications.

I tried my margin with double maggot, which produced a couple small fish before I hooked a carp, but after 5mins the hook pulled. Back into the margin and 15mins later another carp, 20mins later I finally netted a 5-6lb ghostie, which was foul hooked in the front flipper. Thought I did well to get it on .12 bottom and double 4 elastic – thank goodness for pulla bungs!

Moving into the 2nd half of the match, I was probably last in section. I hadn’t fed my LH swim for about 2hrs just to let it completely settle and decided to dump a big cup of caster, with some pellet & corn. A bit of last resort, but I didn’t have any choice since I needed some decent fish. In the meantime I still kept the pellet going into RH swim, as well as feeding the island. Letting the caster settle for 30mins, I tried the far bank with corn and lost a foul hooker. A move to the margins resulted in 2 more lost fish, as well as losing a carp from my RH 13m line. I may let my feeling be know at this time – it was so frustrating, some of the carp were definitely foulhooked, but I was sure at least 2 were hooked properly.

Back over the LH swim and all I got was more roach. Another pot of caster resulted in a couple more roach so that line was binned, as was the island swim, deciding to concentrate on the margins and the RH 13m swim.

With 90mins to go I managed to land a small carp which was again foulhooked. It was getting to the point where I was scared to pull back too hard in case the hook pulled.

In the last hour I kept feeding the RH 13m line with 4mm’s and eventually started to get indications on corn landing 4 carp which were actually hooked in the mouth, including 2 doubles, landing the last 1 just after the whistle.

Definitely got out of jail, with that last hour, catapulting me from near last to 3rd in section, which was a very welcome surprise. In fact I nearly grabbed 2nd in section from Andy Lloyd who weighed 49lb. Tom Thick won the lake from p33 with 74lb. Steve Seager in the meantime had the best silvers weight from the lake with 23lb of mostly chub.

1st 88.4 – Jon Gray – p41
2nd 86.10 – Lewis Jones – p17
3rd 86.5 – Clayton Hudson – p3
4th 84.22 – Ryan Shipp – p22
5th 79.12 – Paul Elmes – p5
6th 74.12 – Tom Thick – p33

Silvers
1st 27.7 – Mat Tomes – p11
2nd 23.0 – Steve Seagar – p27