Plantation Silvers Float Only, Thursday 17th January 2019

I was lucky enough to have a Thursday off, as Plantation is a venue with some great silvers in, not who it was who had to go in the room with the goose fat tub and various other instruments of pleasure to get these 5 matches on this lake, as its not often match fished now.....

A few met up for breakfast in the Bridge in, good bit of banter and the breakfast was OK, but let down by the sausages.  More banter at the draw, I drew peg, which wasn't peg 4 as it had been repegged for the day, it put me on permanent peg 8, not too bad.  Then it turns out there wasn't enough tickets in the tub as a latecomer arrived, so a hastily arranged redraw and I'm now looking at 14, which turns out to be permanent peg 28.

Looked ideal for a small cage feeder towards the gap in the island, but with it being float only, a waggler and pole were the only options.  So, a light rig with strung out No11's for roach, a couple of skimmer rigs, 0.3g and 0.5g - I was surprised at how much the venue has silted up and was using the same rig as I was at Viaduct last week.  I also set up a double bulk rig, just in case that was required.

The pegging to my right was fairly tight, so I couldn't really fish the standard 10 & 2 o'clock lines, more like just past 12 and just before 10.  The 12 o'clock line fed with Tom Thick's Intelligent/Sensas Lake mixed 50/50, that then mixed with about 30% leam.  The 10 o'clock line fed with micros.

Once they were fed I did try optimistically short for roach, but despite trying on and off through the match, a line fed with casters to my left, I didn't have a single indication there.

I had a fish and indications as soon as I went over the GB, I was getting liners and bumped a couple of fish, so put the light rig in the roost and tried the double bulk, less bites, but each on a fairly hooked fish - the initial flurry of bites didn't last long and I did try an expander over the micros, but that just saw roach pestering it.  I refed the micros line with a few more and included some caster and dead maggot.  This did see a couple of roach and a hybrid come to dead maggot on the hook, but the action was far from hectic.

I stared up a new line, loose fed caster as far as I could get them and tried the waggler over the top, a couple of roach, then nothing.  I swapped back to the lighter rig and spent the rest of the match rotating between the pole lines and the waggler, never taking more than 2 consecutive fish of a line before it went quiet again.

I could see pegs 1 & 2 catching and knew they had more than me, so I did push the peg trying to get some bigger skimmers in the last hour, it didn't work, but I'm not convinced it did too much harm, as the lake seemed to slow down for most in the last 90 minutes.

Quite an enjoyable day, I knew I hadn't done enough to win or frame, my 15.15 being enough to win the section and 6th place, so day paid for.