Toss up between Viaduct and trying my hand at a new (to me) venue today, Tony Rixon promised me plenty of bites and he was driving, so Harescombe won, even though it's a bit too snaky for my usual preference.
It's certainly secluded, set up in the hillside in deepest Gloucestershire, the breakfast wasn't too shabby and a reasonable price. The match was £10 including pools, these costcutters seem to be taking over, its a strange thing to my mind, to fish a match that winning doesn't cover your costs, but there was nothing else on.
I had looked at the weather forecast a couple of days ago and it was forecast to be dry, first lesson of the day, check again before setting off, as I left my bait brolly at home and it pissed down for 90% of the match. I drew peg 14, meaningless to me as a venue newbie and I didn't ask about it, I thought I'd let the plummet and a bit of watercraft suss it out. It was 13m to the island, which has wooden stakes all round it, this was about 3 1/2' deep tight to the stakes and about 6" deeper 12" off them, so I set just on bottom at 6" off the boards, a wire stemmed float, 0.12 hooklength and a 18LWG with a band completed that rig. Another wire stemmed float to fish just at the bottom of the near shelf, a nice distance to loose feed caster, this with 0.10 and a 20 LWG. Final rig was a glass stemmed float to fish the edges, topkit + 1 to the left and 10m to the right,
I did set up a 9' rod with a method on, but this never saw the water (apart from the rain!!). I had a pint each of micro's, 4mm's and 6mm's, about a pint and a half of caster and 3 pints of maggots, with the most useful thing in match angling - hindsight - I could have left the maggots at home, in fact I think they cost me......
Starting tight across with a 6mm pellet in the band and feeding 4mm's via a toss pot, I started catching F1's straight away, no big ones, but nice to get some bites and see fish going in the net, also a small barbel. Lifting and dropping was essential to get a bite, often the float just dipping as it resettled, typical finicky F1 bites. after an hour or so the bites started to tail off, so I fed some micro's, this increased the amount of bites, but also liners, so I cut it out again.
Next quiet spell I switched to the short caster line and had a few F1's and skimmers, but it wasn't frantic, I then tried the edges and also started up a maggot line, neither of these were effective and I spent the rest of the match switching between the long pellet line and the short caster line, adding fish, one or two, before having to switch again.
I had no idea what weight i had at the end and was pleasantly surprised to see 60.06 on the scales which was enough for second, behind the wily old Silverfox, who had 63.02. I think the time I wasted on trying to make maggot work cost me the win, as the fish were smaller and less frequent than the pellet and caster fish.
Nice venue, I'll definitely go back, I reckon a proper F1 angler would have emptied it............
1: Mike Nicholls 63.02 peg 20
2: Chris Fox 60.06 peg 14
3: Tony Rixon 52.10 peg 8
4: Martin hook 46.00 peg 11
5: Stuart Graham 44.14 peg 29
6: Adrian Jeffery 42.04 peg 24
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