Float Only League Round 4. Ivy House, Sunday 19th July 2015

After Tuesdays practice match, I had decided to stick with pellet and maggot for down the edge for this round of the float only, although I did have a couple of pints of live maggot in case I drew the canal.  I plucked peg 15, which is on the match lake, out of the tin, in the middle of the causeway, looking back towards the café, not a peg I would have chosen for myself, but I still thought the pellet would see a few fish in the net.

A decent weight of skimmers had come from this bank on Tuesday, taken on paste, so I set up a paste rig, to fish over the pellet feed.  I set up two rigs to fish at full depth, one for soft pellet and one with a band, finally a margin rig, as I had an empty peg to my right.  To complete the tackling up, I set up a light waggler, as the wind was off my back and the ripple was not within pole reach, this could be fished at depth or shallow, if the fish came off the bottom.

I started at 6m fishing soft pellet over softened 4mm’s and had a run of skimmers, they started to decrease in size, so I topped the line up and had a look on the waggler, which stayed resolutely visible, no indications of fish out there.  Back on the 6m line and a switch to 6mm hard pellet resulted in a similar lack of bites.  Switching back to soft pellet saw the float going under again, but the skimmers were now in the 2-3oz bracket, so that was going nowhere fast.  I upped the feed to try and get some carp in to push the skimmers out, not sure this was my wisest idea, as the skimmer bites dried up and there was no indication of a carp in the vicinity.

Back on the waggler and 2^nd cast it went under, a 2lb fouler was the result, further casts failed to locate any of his mates and by now I was struggling to see where my next fish was coming from.  I had targeted two areas in the margin, one right up to the pallet of peg 16, where I had just fed 8mm pellet, which was the best bait on Tuesday, I also fed a GB and maggot line at about 5m along the bank, next to a lone clump of grass.  I saw some colouring of the water on both lines and dropped 7 maggots into the GB line, this brought a quick fish which was a welcome sight in the net, probably just about a  double.  There certainly weren’t fish competing in the margins, it seemed like one fish at a time coming in and if it touched the line or saw the pole it would spook off in a big swirl.  

Up to the pallet with a 8mm pellet and I could see a fish with its back out of the water making its way to towards my pellet, which it duly took and another double netted.  Next drop in on this line resulted in a foul hooker, which ploughed off and shed the hook.  The sun was starting to come out from behind the clouds now, I decided to throw the GB into the 5m margin, to make some noise and attract the fish, this seemed to work, as I dropped double worm in on top of the cloud and another double was netted after a tussle.

Here is the part where hindsight is marvelous; the sun coming out seemed to stop the fish coming into the flat calm margin, whilst I persisted in trying to attract one in and fishing to even the smallest hint of a mud cloud.  I should have switched back to fishing long and hope to land a couple of carp and some skimmers, which would have probably been enough to lift my 46lb into the frame, from my 10^th place finish, no guarantee of course, as the lakes seemed to fish fairly hard, apart from peg 12, from which Chris Davies annihilated the match with 37lb.  

1. Chris Davis 317-11-0 peg 11
2. Bela Bakos 81-14-0 peg 39
3. Dick Bull 67-11-0 peg 20
4. Steve Tucker 61-04-0 peg NC10
5. Craig Edmonds 55-14-0 peg 4
6. Martyn Lenaghan 51-08-0 peg 14

  Silvers:

1. Steve Tucker 45-12-0 peg NC10
2. Leon Hubbard 40-01-0 peg 17
3. Clint Wojtyle 26-05-0 peg 3