The roads weren't too bad and it took an hour which passed with the usual fishing talk and putting the world to rights, got there in plenty of time for a large breakfast & coffee. Andy had 17 booked in and was looking for volunteers to fish a section on Kingfisher, the recently filled and stocked canal lake. I said I'd give it a go, as did Tony, a couple of others did and Gary Ethridge was late so was conscripted into the canal section.
The canal has a large head of small carp and a selection of decent silvers, so hopefully a few bites to be had. Into the tub and out comes peg 10, meant nothing, but it had been the 'cold' end of the lake when Tony & I walked it before the draw. Peg 6 was rumoured to be the flier, regular Val drew that, Tony on 4 and Gary managed to pull himself 12, the end peg.
Simple approach today, stockie fish like pellets, so the bait tray had 4 & 6mm pellets on it, I did have a tin of corn and some dead maggots, as well as a kilo of worms, which had been brought expecting to be fishing the match lake. Four rigs today, of which two were used, first was a Hillbilly Chump 0.3 on 0.16 to 0.14 with a 18 LEG and a hair rig band, this was for fishing short. Next set up was a float I used on 4 out of 5 days during the Frenzee festival, a homemade diamond with a carbon stem - its amazingly stable in the wind or tow. This was on 0.15 (just using up some old Powerline I had lying round) to a 0.12 hooklength and a 18 LWG again with a band,
I did set up a rig to fish across and found a shelf tight to the far bank at 16m, but never went over there, so no more about that one.... Also a margin rig, which I did try for about 5 minutes, but had seen no signs of fish, so that was all that had.
On the all in I started at topkit + 1 and had bites straight away feeding 4mm pellets with a 6mm in the band, I took the +1 off and still caught on the topkit, I stayed with this, not feeding anywhere else for the first hour, taking 45 small carp, reviewing it on the hour mark, I decided to keep going and put 40 in the net in the second hour. To encourage bites when it slowed I put an occasional nugget of micros in on top of the float, but too much just seemed to send them scatty.
By the start of the third hour, things had slowed considerably, I could see Gary on 12 still catching, but he was feeding caster and I felt some caster or live maggot would have been the thing to revive my peg. As usual Gary was topkit at arms length, stood up, loads of elastic out and I thought he was getting better stamp fish, turns out he wasn't, he was just using No1 Zim or something similar....
I went out to the joint of 6/7 section resting on my knee and fed some micros and 4mm, trying 6mm and corn over the top, this was a lot slower and only 15 fish came to the net in the third hour - not having maggots was costing me I felt. I switched between the topkit line and the middle and there was enough bites and activity to keep my trying to increase the frequency, rather than go right across.
I had made up some GB to try down the edge, I wasn't confident as there is no flat ledge along the margin, just a steeply shelving slope. I decided with about 40 minutes to go to dump a pot of this down the track over the micro line, GB and dead maggot. I went over this with a hair rigged worm section and immediately started catching skimmers and bream, bugger why didn't I do that earlier!!!
I had 4 or 5 and then it slowed up, I topped up and immediately hooked a 5lb carp, which ran around the peg for a few minutes on the 0.12 and No8 elastic. I didn't have a bite for 20 minutes after that and then had two more decent skimmers in the last 5 minutes.
It turns out I should have tried the GB earlier, as I put 71.10 on the scales for 3rd and was 6.14 away from Tony who took the win, poor decision making cost me this match, but it was interesting and whilst I wouldn't want to fish for carp that small all the time, I am going to try and get back before too long, as the combination of a couple of hours frantic topkit thrashing followed by some trying to get the big skimmers makes for an enjoyable day. Its good news that Andy and Karen didn't sell up, they are now working hard to improve the fishery and attract anglers to matches, there is a Thursday Costcutter every week on Kingfisher if you fancy plenty of bites.
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