Monday, 25 August 2014

Maver Pairs, Larford Lakes, Saturday 23 August 2014



I had paired up with Mike Walker to fish this match and given that Mike has fished the Match lake a few times, he was going to be on there and myself on Speci lake.  We had a decent drive up and had decided that my drawing arm should be kept well away from the draw buckets today, so Mike did the honours, giving me peg 9 on Speci and himself peg 13 (or was it 11, bit of a senior moment here…) on Match.
The latest results and information we had was from the UK Champs which had been on Wednesday, Mike was definitely at the ‘right’ end of his section and my draw wasn’t too bad, that’s if the fish hadn’t used their fins……

Plenty of time to get ready, but I wasn’t tempted to set up more than I planned, we had discussed a basic plan and decided not to deviate from this, as in a 5 hour match against some venue experts and top anglers, we felt our best chance was not having too many options.  This for me was a method feeder, a straight lead, pellet waggler and a rig for 5-7m (wherever the  shelf/bottom, plumbed up with a not too steep slope).  The plan was to start on the method feeder, whilst feeding a bomb/waggler line frequently with 8mm pellets, the method was fished a little way past this to show any liners, indicating the fish were over the bomb line.
First chuck in I had a drop back on the method, I missed the freespool lever and the baitrunner span like a whirling dervish, creating a huge birds nest of the line, which was never going to be untangled. So I had to handline it back in, new spool on and reset up, I may have well as not bothered, there were no further bites forthcoming.  

To cut a long and boring story short, I managed one carp, on the pellet waggler, the only bite I had.  After about 3 ½ hours I deviated from the plan and tried worm on the pole, hoping to catch anything, just to put another fish in the net. This was pointless, as I had no indication of any kind on the pole.  I wasn’t alone in struggling there were a fair few who managed less than my one carp, the weights were low, with only a handful of the 50 odd of anglers on the lake managing to put 5 or 6 fish together.

Meanwhile, whilst I was letting the side down, Mike fished a tidy match and kept alternating between method and bomb, various baits and put together a section winning 59lb.  It was very disappointing to do so poorly, bu I really have no idea what I could have done differently, apart from stick to one method the whole match, the lake fished so badly, I have was a loss to know what I could have done to get more than the one bite.

I didn’t get the results, but they should be on the Larford website in the next couple of days.

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