Acorn Winter League Final Round, Saturday 29th February 2020

Last round of this league that has had very definitive sections, with A section producing the match winner every round (including this one).  Still as section points were key, it didn't matter about that.

Another stormy day forecast - great.  I was level at the top before taking into account droppers and this league is 5 matches, dropping your worst result, with weight deciding places equal on points at the end.  using this criteria I was 4th going into today and in the best section, so hopefully a few bites.

Disappointed to see 3 no shows, two of which were in the league leaders section, potentially affecting the result.  One had a broken bone, so understandable.

Into the draw bag and ping pong ball 13 comes out, its not won the section, but it has been second and when I found out 11 wasn't drawn I was happy, the best I could do is win the section, what others did was out of my hands.

No need to rush to the peg, for some reason we get 90 minutes to set up and with being able to park behind your peg, that's more than enough time.  Two lead rods, just in case the wind, which was straight at me, got too much for the pole. I did set up a topkit to fish banded pellet, but never had a bite on it, so no more to say about that.

Topkits to fish right across, on the second shelf, down the track at 5m and the RH margin, all with 0.14 hooklengths and 18 LWG hooks.  KND yellow elastic completes the set up.

Bit tray was simple, live and dead maggots, micros, expanders and hard pellets.  The only baits that were really used were the micros and maggots, I didn't have a bite on anything but maggots, the fish wanted some bait put in, not huge amounts at once, but little and often seemed best.

I'd started on bread on the bomb, searching round the peg and had one liner, so after 15 minutes switched to fishing across, maggot over micros and that saw a couple of carp netted after first landing a skimmer and a roach.

The 5m line produced a couple and I switched between both to keep an odd fish coming, with a couple of hours to go, I looked down the RH margin and immediately had a big F1 on triple maggot, followed by a carp, then one took me round the pallet leg, I lost it and never had another bite there.

A first for me, after losing the carp under the pallet of peg 12, I tried a pellet feeder in front of the pallet, again with maggots on the hook and had 3 carp on this, before switching back to the 5m line and rounding off the match with 3 more.  I thought I had 70lb of carp and a few silvers, including a 2lb perch.  The scales gave me 74.12, the required section win and the match win, that left me on equal points with Paul Nichols in second place, but missed out by weight, so a reasonable series, 3 section wins from 6.

Todays weigh sheets

League ended up as:

Craig Challigsworth 32 points 

Paul Nichols 30 points 238.09

Chris Fox 30 points 203.02

Mark Bartlett 29 points

Thanks to Brian & Paul for running it, well done to Craig and all the framers.