Saturday 11 May 2013

Viaduct Open, Saturday 11th May 2013

Back to Viaduct for the second time this week, I rang and booked in Friday afternoon, expecting to be preparing 8mm pellets and 10mm meat, only to be told the match was on the Match Lake.  A phone call to Tony Rixon saw several pints of his finest casters hand delivered to my my door - what service, you can't get that from online tackle dealers - thanks Tony, it's appreciated.

11 fishing today, I pulled 49 from the coffee tin, probably wouldn't have been my first choice, but I felt there would be a few fish to be caught.  As the weather has taken another step backwards (another match that has been affected by the wind, seems to be nearly every week now!!).  I called into the garage on the way to the match and bought some bread, as a last resort to have in the bait bag.  I set up a straight  lead (last time I take one with a fine tip made up, as it came out of the rodbag broken).  A waggler on the trusty Normark Microlight to target skimmers and two pole rigs, a pencil float with a hollow tip to fish soft pellet, that was on 0.16, with a 16 Drennan silverfish hook and a 12x10 Malman float whose name escapes me on 0.14 with a 0.10 hooklength with a 20 Drennan silverfish hook.  I had a topkit on the roost for a margin rig, which as I intended to fish for silvers didn't have a rig on it, it was there just as a backup in case the silvers plan failed.

At the all in I fed two lines, one at 11 o'clock (11m) with micros and softened 4's, a line at 2 o'clock with groundbait, caster and dead maggot (13m). Leaving them to settle I did have three or four chucks with the straight lead and bread, which resulted in one 4oz roach.  A look over the groundbait line resulted in caster or dead maggot being ragged by tiny fish, so a swap to the pellet line saw three F1's into the net and a couple of small skimmers, but it was quiet. I was hoping to avoid F1's as they were counting as carp today and I did put together a short run of 5 or 6 skimmers from 8oz to 1.08oz before this line died.  On the next peg Alan Oram was similarly struggling, I tried the caster and waggler, this resulted in the same tiny fish (rudd less than 0.5oz), so up the bank it went.

I spent pretty much the rest of the match fishing caster on my topkit, this was producing roach and rudd to 6oz, tench to 3lb and some decent hybrids. To catch the better fish the bait had to be lowered in not flicked out, as laying it out seemed to encourage the tiny rudd.

The plan to go for silvers paid off, as my 23.07 of silvers was enough to take top silvers,( the skimmers didn't feed properly anywhere on the lake) and the three F1's went 5.12 for a total of 29.03.  Hard work to keep the fish coming, but worth it in the end and it wouldn't have been achieved without the casters.

1) Nick Collier 47.12 peg 52
2) Howard Webb 45.13 peg 45
3) Matt Squiggle 42.02 peg 44
4) Roland Lucas 37.02 peg 43
5) Chris Fox 29.03 peg 49
6) John Green 27.05 peg 51

Silvers

1) Chris Fox 23.07 peg 49
2) Nick Collier 17.10 peg 52
3) Paul Blake 12.10 peg 42

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