Viaduct Spring League, Last Round, Sunday 18th June 2017

The league hasn't been kind to me this year, so there was little to do but try for the win on the day today, thoughts of a chance of that were dashed when I drew 102, the diagonal bank hasn't been the best area so far this year - Tony also drew it, I think there is a jinx on travelling in his new van.....

Two wagglers set up, one at depth and one for shallow, I did set up a lead rod, but only to use in desperation. I set up two meat rigs, one with just 3x11down the line, one a more standard bulk and droppers.  Two pellet rigs, one deep and one shallow and as I thought sport would be slow given my draw and the heat, a paste rig to try.  No margin rig, as I had Nicky Ewers on 103 and a tree to my right, I was not confident at all of catching in that edge.  Nicky had the fortune of no one to his left until Andy Neal 0n 109, as 105 wasn't drawn.

Chatting to Nicky before the off we both were starting on meat and I said, "we'll get the obligatory skimmer on this line and then not much else".  That's exactly what happened, the down side was my skimmer was 3oz, whereas Nicky's was 2lb.  I then had a roach on the meat and decided that it may not be the way to go....

To cut a long story short, after 3 hours I had a couple of skimmers and no carp, then I had one 5.08 on the long pellet line on the deck - couldn't get a bite shallow.  There just didn't seem to be any carp around, I wasn't alone in struggling, as Nicky and Bob Gullick who was on 100, were also scratching round, although Nicky was getting a run of decent skimmers, whilst if I fished a 6mm pellet I got 3oz skimmers, frustrating.

I did hook one more carp on the long pole line, it leapt from the water like a skimmer and was gone, so that summed up the day really.  Couldn't get too much enthusiasm for it after that to be honest and wasn't too disappointed to hear the all out.

My 18lb wasn't last in section,  I was only 307lb behind Mark Wynne who won at a canter from peg 64 with 325lb, that also saw him win the league with a 4 point score.  Well done Mark and I can now put what was a pretty disastrous league behind me and get on with some opens.