Callum's Open, Viaduct Campbell. Saturday 7th June

I booked into this match thinking it would be good to get on Campbell and catch a few fish, how wrong could I be!!
Since my decision to be a bit more single minded and fish for carp, my weights and enjoyment have both seemed to plummet,  not much good when you are sat on a peg, thinking, "why am I here, I'd rather be doing something else".

I drew peg 118, I wasn't disappointed with the draw, I felt I'd catch a few from it, the LH margin being a banker for a few fish during the day and often produces fish for longer than just the last hour. I set up a waggler and a lead rod, the waggler didn't get used, the wind was all wrong.  The lead rod was used, but only produced 2 liners, so bugger all to say about that either.

4 pole rigs were the mainstay of my plan, shallow and full depth rigs to fish banded pellet, a meat rig to fish short and a rig to fish down the LH margin, which was very similar depths at 7m and 13m along the bank.

Starting on the full depth rig with 6mm pellet it took me 45 minutes to hook a fish, which then managed to deposit the hook in my silvers net...... not a great start.   I had Roy Worth for company on 119 and Roy was catching on the lead and the pole down to the end bank, just to rub it in and make me feel even more bloody useless..

As an experiment, with the MMT match coming up, I tried feeding meat short to my left and pellet short to the right, the meat line was barren, I didn't have a single bite on it, the pellet line was fizzing, but no sign of carp. I tried a soft pellet on the meat rig, over the pellet feed and managed a couple of skimmers and two bream, but it was tough going.  I saw the swirl of a carp and decided to make some paste and set up a paste rig, this I duly did and it produced one foul hooked skimmer and one carp in over an hours fishing.

By now Roy was handing me a right hiding and my banker margin produced one carp, one tench and two fish that took the rigs into the underwater jungle.  So with 3/4 of an hour to go, I had 4 carp, a tench and the previously mentioned bream and skimmers, Roy had gone to his margin and was catching there as well, that was the final straw, I packed up and chucked my meagre catch back.

I am going to honour the leagues and commitments to matches I have made, but apart from that I can't say I have any inclination to go fishing, I'm not enjoying it, spending ages on preparation and then being unable to get a bite, whilst the next peg sacks up.

I didn't get the results, but I'm sure Ken Rayner will have them on his blog when he puts it up.