Simple bait tray for today, meat and hard pellets and a couple of bags of dead maggots, along with some groundbait for the margin. The spit is an obvious place to target, but as mentioned, the fish are small, its also a horrible bottom to plumb up, as it goes up and down like a sine wave. I set up a simple homemade float to fish pellet on the flattest bit of bottom I could find. 0.16 hooklength and a 16 LWG hook with a band, with the intention of fishing 6mm pellet and feeding 4mm.
I also set up a meat rig to fish short, a Malman Roob, again a 0.16 hooklength, this time with a 16 Kaizen hook. A wire stemmed NG Gimp to fish pellet on the deck out to the aerator, another 16 LWG and a band. Two edge rigs, as the LH margin and RH margin are very different depths, the RH being 18" - 2' deeper. Finally a rig for mugging, as Tim Ford and Paul Faiers opposite could see lots of cruisers, although they weren't showing my side of the rope.
I started in the open water on the deck fishing 6mm pellet, feeding 4mm pellet by catapult, first drop in I had an F1, then a roach, then a hybrid and several more roach. I hadn't come to catch roach, so swapped to the line against the spit, which I had been feeding since the off. This produced a run of F1's and a couple of small carp, but this was also going nowhere fast. I saw a couple of bigger fish and they wouldn't go down and pick up a pellet, so a switch to the shallow rig was in order, but this only saw a couple of fish netted and the bigger ones were having none of it.
I started feeding the RH margin, as it was deeper I fed it with 8mm pellet and meat and had an early look, I did have 2 fish from it and hooked a third, which was a good fish, but it was plodding around and then caught me out by heading to my left and into the weed bed between 41 and 42, as soon as it touched the weedbed the 0.18 hooklength gave up - bugger! I was surprised to find that this put an end to the bites down this edge, as the fish was lost so far from the fed area.
Back across to the spit and a couple more F1's and a small carp were netted, before I fed the LH margin with GB and maggots. Virtually instantly there were signs of fish and whilst I left it settle for 15 or 20 minutes, I couldn't resist and went in there amongst the swirls. I had three fish straight away, biggest just about a double, but then swirls stopped. I had another fish, but rather than several in there at once I had to wait for a fish to come along. I did refed it and leave it, going back in the RH margin and taking a couple more on meat, before going back over the GB in the last half hour and managing another double.
I thought I had about 125lb and it turned out I wasn't too far out, putting 133.02 on the scales for a lake win (and happy that Tony was paying it continental style, with the lake winners rather than overall winner picking up). Enjoyable day, it was bloody cold sat in the shade all day, but at least I had a few bites and something to work at. Beaten by two weights on Match lake, Tony Rixon and Gary O'Shea weighing 185 and 150 respectively.
1: Tony Rixon 185.15 peg 6
2: Gary O'Shea 150.02 peg 5
3: Chris Fox 133.02 peg 41
4: Ryan Radford 132.13 peg 16
5: Joe McMahon 1177.07 peg 1
6: Shawn Townsend 110.07 peg 46
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