Landsend Wednesday Open 12th June 2013

I had booked into Viaduct, but a phonecall at 5pm on Tuesday night with news that the Viaduct match was cancelled, due to low numbers, saw me with the option of pleasure fishing or having another bash at Landsend. A quick call to Tony Rixon and he kindly brought round a couple of pints of caster Tuesday evening.

So the plan was to fish for silvers, caster and meat being the two main lines of attack, with some pellet in reserve. I drew 15 and listened to the rest of the field bemoaning the fact that Trigger had drawn peg 19 and the match was won before we left Mike's cabin.

I set up a NG Gimp to fish caster and it would do for short and at 10m just before the lake bed started shelving up to the island. A rig to fish meat at 5m, a margin rig and a rig to fish banded 6mm pellet up the shelf -  which didn't produce a bite!!

Loose feeding caster and meat at the start and I dropped in on the short caster line and had two F1's and a small perch, before the bites dried up. Out to the 10m line and there was little action here either, just one skimmer after an hour. I decided to mix up some groundbait and fed it on the 10m line in quite tightly compacted balls, to get it and its caster content to the bottom. This brought an immediate response and several decent skimmers fell to double caster over it.

A look on the 5m meat line produced a lift bite and the one and only fish on it, a 1½lb skimmer. The short caster line produced a run of small perch, the hoped for Tench, conspicuous by their absence. I had feed a meat line into the LH margin and this produced 3 small carp, before a much bigger specimen took the rig right up to the elastic into the tree by peg 14 - one of my favourite, no longer made, MW margin floats.... As sport was quiet, I set up another one and added a 1lb+ chub to the silvers net.

Back on the 10m line and it was a long wait between bites for decent skimmers, I didn't catch a single roach, so nothing to keep weight going in the net. The last half hour saw me land a carp on the caster rig and lose a couple more, as they started to have a munch after 4pm.

My carp went 14lb or so and the silvers 24.04 which was joint second in the silvers, so I may as well have saved the caster money and fished pellet.  As was the common prediction at the start, Trigger won and Tom Thick was second, only 3 pegs in on the car park side, 1 - 5 - 11, whilst every other peg was in on the opposite side.

1) Trigger 106.08 peg 19
2) Tom Thick 96.01 peg 11
3) Clint W 79.00 peg 5
4) Martin Lenaghan 48.12 peg 1
5) Matt Tomes 41.05 peg 21
6) Nick Brown 40.01 peg 23

Silvers

1) Phil 'Fabio' Harding 25.00 peg 17
=2) Chris Fox (peg 15) and Trigger (peg 19) 24.04