Looking forward to a days silver fishing, but it seemed that a succession of wrongs desicions were to plague my day. Stopped at Shipham cafe on the way down and instead of putting my glasses on and studying the menu, I ordered a large breakfast, expecting two of everything - a bit of a shock when large actually means large, three of everything. First incorrect decision of the day!!
Into the draw tin and I picked two swimcards stuck together, I'm never too sure what to do in that situation, so I dropped both back in and pulled out a single one, which was peg 19, bugger, a carp peg and I had brought pretty much only silvers rigs with me - second poor decision.
I decided to try again and 'beat' the peg (I've drawn it before and dismally failed to get past the carp) and get some silvers from it, so set up three rigs, a sensas pencil float on 0.14/.10 for a close caster line, a 4x14 chimp to fish caster or soft pellet down the track, this was on 0.16 with a 0.12 hook length, Finally a rig for right across, to fish caster on the shelf, thinking that this might bring forth a carp or two, this was on 0.16. The all in saw me pot some caster right over, a few micro's down the track and caster short, starting short, the float settled and buried, a perch not far off 1lb was soon in the net, taking double red maggot, then two missed bites before a carp, which trashed the rig - that was to be a familiar scene during the day.
I had the Wincanton silver machine on peg 18 and Nicky was suffering the same fate as me, carp trashing rigs and hook lengths, we both tried upping the line size, but anything over 0.12 and the float just sat still, as if there wasn't a fish in the peg. Peg 5 was catching well, so there were some fish feeding, I switched to hard pellet over the micro's and that brought a couple of carp, 2 F1's and a skimmer, trying soft pellet brought a couple more carp, but the silvers were playing hard to get.
I had a very quiet middle couple of hours, adding nothing to either net, the close line producing nothing at all apart from the first dob in perch. The far shelf was so deep that I ended up taking off the rig and making up another heavier, one small roach and a small carp were the only takers of some pristine caster. I had to do something so switched to fishing towards the gap in the islands at full depth, taking one carp and losing a couple of foulers on banded pellet. So modifying the shelf rig to fish 1/2 depth, saw 2 more fish in the net before that line went totally dead. Backdown the track with soft pellet and two more carp in the last 20 minutes gave me I guessed about 55lb in total - not going to be enough as Dave Roper and Martin Pettifer both had big weights on meat - I didn't bring any, as I didn't think it would work with the cold snap - another wrong decision, but I wasn't alone, as Nicky Collins was also surprised by the catch rate of the two using meat.He like me, found that fishing caster on line that would get a snag heading carp out, wouldn't produce a bite. I made up 7 rigs on the bank, as the floats were destroyed by the eyes pulling out or the bodies becoming detached from the wire as the carp either snapped the line or snagged themselves (3 times in my own nets).
The scales saw Martin win with 108lb odd, Dave second with 104lb, I managed 59lb odd, but my catch and release policy early in the match cost me, as Mike West was last in the money with 65lb. See Tony's blog for the full result.
No comments:
Post a Comment