Final round of the Landsend Winter League, thanks to Ken
Rayner for organising it and being the butt of much piss taking, all of which
he took in the good humour it was intended.
My intention this year had been to have a decent attempt at
framing in the overall table, after last years second place in the
silvers. The first couple of matches and
the lack of carp put the mockers on that and left me with the silvers to pursue
in the hope of an envelope at the end of the series.
Going into this last match, I was leading the silvers league
by 1 point and a fairly decent weight advantage, but if the decent
skimmers/bream in the match lake fed in the forecast windy conditions, that
weight advantage could be easily wiped out.
I was on lake 3, which is probably the toughest lake to be on when
trying to gain a silvers section win, as a couple of the pegs hold F1’s which
count as silvers on this venue and there are not the bonus big perch, tench and
bream that show up in the other lakes.
I felt I needed to draw 41, 42, 68 or 70 to compete, but the
forecast of gusts up to 65mph might level things up a bit, I wasn’t
disappointed to see 41 on the draw ticket when I extracted it from the bucket,
so in with a chance of holding onto top spot.
I set up 3 rigs, a 4x12 sensas pencil float to fish topkit
or topkit +1 to try and catch roach, rudd
and perch, this had a 0.10 hooklength and a 18 6313. A NG Gimp with 0.10
hooklength and a 16 6313 for pellet in case the skimmers had a go, and a float
whose name eludes me to fish worm, caster or maggot over some GB , this had a
0.10 hooklength and a 18 6313 as well.
The forecasters weren’t wrong and it was a thoroughly
unpleasant day to be pole fishing, I only got out topkits and 4 sections and at
times, just fishing the topkit was bad enough.
On the all-in I fed some micros and 4mm’s on a line off to my right at
about 7m, this produced one tiny skimmer on a 6mm expander, so little else to
say about this, the GB line was fed with two ‘jaffas’ and left to settle as I
started on the topkit+ 1 and managed a few small roach and perch. After wasting time not getting any bites on
pellet, I dropped a worm head onto the GB line and had a small skimmer, but the
float was far too light in the windy conditions, so took it off and on went a
0.5g rig, this saw two skimmers (3-4oz, so nothing to get excited about) in two
put ins before it went quiet again.
Rotating round the lines and just getting odd small fish I
was concerned when I saw what looked like a big F1 landed on the feeder from
peg 42, if it was an F1, it had just wiped out all my tiny fish in one
cast. I decided I needed to try and
catch some F1’s, so set up a 9’ lead rod with a small cage feeder and had a few
casts to the spit, this produced one unwanted carp and 2 small roach, no sign of
an F1.
By now the wind had swung round a little and was blowing
into me from the left, making things even more tricky and unpleasant,
especially as I could see Tony Rixon and Paul Faiers catching carp quicker than
I could catch tiny skimmers.
I had to
improve my catch rate and decided to stick with fishing a topkit to hand and
feeding maggot/caster. I upped the hook
size to a 16 and started centre hooking the maggot to improve bites hit ratio (
and the maggots last longer) and just got my head down, its not something that
I find particularly enjoyable, but it was a means to an end and it paid off,
with 10.02 of whitebait for a lake silvers win and the silvers league by one
point from Gary O’Shea, who had been pushing hard. I dropped 2 points weighing
68.15, Gary dropped 3 points weighing 42.13.
A nice way to round off the week, with a couple more
envelopes, well done to Tony Rixon for winning the overall league only dropping
one point and with a huge weight advantage of 200lb+.
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