I was looking forward to this after a long week at work, finishing at 11pm Saturday night. As any chance of a place in the league standings is long gone, I had prepared a positive approach of 8mm pellet on the waggler and paste short. This plan was slightly altered by drawing peg 10, which is an end peg, so a bank to fish to, although the margin is still a good 4' deep, deeper than I'd like ideally. I had two wagglers already set up, a 2 swan pellet waggler and a full depth waggler, I bought a couple of the blue plastic Preston wagglers last time I was at Whiteacres and used this, can't say I was impressed with how they cast, doubt if I'll be buying any more!!
Pole rigs were a paste rig for 5m, just at the bottom of the slope, a rig to fish the end bank margin, as well as a depth pellet rig and shallow pellet rig, neither of which touched the water. I decided against putting any groundbait into the end bank swim, because of the depth and the way it quickly sloped off to deeper water, this was fed with 8mm pellets, hemp and corn, the 5m line was fed with hemp and softened 6mm pellets, before starting on the pellet waggler, I fished this towards a tree on the end bank, as this was the only area of the peg with any signs of fish in. It didn't take too long before I had netted my first fish, although this proved to be a bit of a false dawn, as bites were hard to come by and after 3/4 of an hour I switched to the depth waggler, this produced a fish, then a couple of unhittable bites, which I am sure were liners, so back on the pellet waggler and another fish taken. I managed to loose two wagglers to the end bank vegetation and as it was so quiet, I went round and retrieved them both, one had a fair bit of line on it and I hate leaving line trailing around.
It was now 3 hours into the match and I had very little to show for it, the paste line had no fizzing of indication that there were fish evident, so I went to the end bank, which I had been feeding, but left alone as long as I could. I took two fish in two drop ins from here, on double corn, taking my weight to 25lb, then the pleasure anglers on the canal, who were in close proximity to my end bank swim, decided to walk up and down and chat, they had on a white Tee shirt and one had a yellow reflective jacket on (god knows why, it was very warm!!) that was the end of that line, I had one more bite from it and that was a lonesome tench.
With 2 hours to I dropped back in on the paste line, as there was on odd bubble coming up, I had a couple of skimmers and another carp in the next hour. The bubbles started to get more vigorous in the last hour and I had a few more skimmers and a few carp, but no quality, the biggest fish was taken with 9 minutes to go and was about 9lb, the biggest fish by 4lb easily. In the last half hour, there was bits of twig and old black leaves coming to the top as fish were rooting around in the bottom, it was a case of too little too late today and I think I ended up about 7th with 83lbish, of which 50lb was caught in the last hour. I was pretty pissed off with the pleasure anglers, but they were real novices and obviously had no idea of the effect they had on my peg, as it would have only taken a short run of fish from there to move me into a framing position.
Didn't get the results as I had to dash off and get to the Indian for a nice curry, so I'm sure Tony will have them on his blog.
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