The title says Avon Angling Open, but it was more a knock up really, with just 7 of us there, its madness really, 3 matches within a 15 mile or so radius, although one is a series.
I had both options covered today, i.e. to fish for silvers or carp, the silvers would be my preference, but if the peg was full of hungry carp I'd fish for them. The draw seemed to settle it, as in form Craig 'Trigger' Edmunds drew peg 11, with me as his nearest neighbour on 7, so a silvers attack it was.
I did set up a rig to fish pellet across, just in case, and a meat rig that would suffice for 5m and by shallowing up a float length, the near margin. A simple silvers rig consisting of a NG Gimp, with a 0.14 hooklength and a 16 Red Carp Maggot, with a bulk and two droppers to fish worm over groundbait/CW&C at 8m. The same rig would also let me fish short, where a couple of bonus fish usually come from during the match.
On the all in I fed two balls of groundbait with a few casters and chopped worm in at 8m, loose fed caster just in front of the keepnets and catapulted 6mm pellet to the far shelf (which was about 14" deep). Second lay in of the rig and a 2½lb skimmer graced the net, taking half a small dendra. It was a bit of a false dawn as it took a while for the next bite, a small perch. By now there were signs of carp on the far shelf and all through the match a huge mouth kept coming out of the water and sucking pellets from the mudline, the fish was a very big double.
It did tempt me and the pellet rig was swung into action and as the pole approached the far bank, the fish disappeared, I foul hooked one, that came off almost immediately and I knew that my island pellet dangling skills were no where near good enough to beat Trigger who was catching a few fish on peg 11.
Back to the silvers and swapping between the 8m line and the topkit kept a few small perch and roach coming. I topped up the 8m line with another ball of g/bait and left it 15 minutes, first drop in saw a big ide in the net, next put in another 2lb+ skimmer, then the vermin moved in, blowing and bubbling over the groundbait, I hooked and landed two who took the worm and foul hooked some. I spent the rest of the match short, catching perch and roach.
It was an interesting experiment to see how the fish reacted to groundbait, but it might just too early for the worm and caster to work properly, as my hard work for silvers was wiped out by Rod Wootton who managed to get a decent net of skimmers on 8mm pellet. I did pick up the silvers by default, as Rod took second place behind....... do I need to say, Trigger!!
The results board had disappeared by the time I got back to the car park, but it was something like this:
1) Trigger, 140lbish peg 11
2) Rod Wootton 63lbish peg 21
3) Ron Hardiman 53lbish peg 5
4) Alan Oram 52lbish peg 15
5) Chris Fox 27.04 peg 9
6) John Bradford 15lbish peg 17
Silvers
1) Rod 28lbish
2) Chris Fox 18.04
3) John Bradford 15ishlb
No comments:
Post a Comment