Bait tray was a bit cluttered given the 2 pronged approach for silvers and carp, meat, 4 & 6mm pellets, corn, dead maggots, casters and worms. I planned to fish pellet / corn to the RH margin, meat to the end bank and at 5m, with corn at waggler range, caste/GB at 13m off to my left and a pellet line at 14.5m off to the right. A caster/maggot line to hopefully entice some hybrids and tench down to the rushes on my LH side. Personally I'm not a believer in trying to feed all these lines continually, I tend to concentrate on one or two and only feed the others when changing to them, the exception being the caster / GB line which I would feed and keep topped up if necessary.
Standard starting ploy for me on Viaduct, feed 3/4 cubes of meat via a pole pot at 5m, lower a cube into that on a light rig. Instant response and within 4 mins an 8lber was in the net, I thought I'd be ignoring the silvers and fishing for carp!! Next two drop in's and two more bite, two more fish, but not carp, perch, it seems like the carp was a lone soul. I spent an hour trying to catch another carp. before giving it up and reverting to plan A, looking for silvers, I had a run of 6-8oz perch down the LH edge, before that went quiet.
A switch to the corn and waggler saw only one bite in 20 minutes and that was from a 6oz skimmer - the intended target, but smaller than I wanted. I switched to the pole and fished caster over the GB, nothing, even though there were odd skimmer bubbles coming up, worm was equally as ineffective, finally dead maggot brought a 12oz skimmer to the net. It was painfully slow and I added only 4 more skimmers between 12oz and a pound in an hour.
A switch back to the LH edge saw the odd roach and perch, again, caster was a non-starter, I could a 3 or 4 drop in's with caster, nothing, then switch to double dead maggot and get a fish instantly - albeit a small perch or roach. With and hour and 15 minutes to go I then hooked a carp, which I landed, approx. 9lb, next drop in, hooked another and it charged off and bottomed out the elastic, hooklength went and float disintegrated against the keepnet as it came back at warp speed.
Chucked the lead out whilst I set up a new rig, upping the hooklength to 0.14, tip never moved so I dropped back in and immediately had another carp, this was repeated until the end, I landed them all, up to 12lb on the 0.14 and a 18 LWG hook, was this why I got them? Or was it just carp o'clock?
Fishing four hours for silvers proved to be an expensive mistake, as I am sure I could have winkled out a couple more carp in that 4 hours, as I had the 8lber in the first hour and ended up with 81.06, so 73lb in the last hour, which with my hard won 12.02 of silvers went 93.08 which was 4th on the day, one out of the money (thats been a common theme this year...) with 117.03 winning from 123. Still it didn't rain, had a few bites from a peg I didn't really fancy at the start, so can't complain.
1. Tom Downing - 117lb 3oz - peg 123
2. Adrian Jeffery - 108lb 12oz - peg 129
3. Jim Butcher - 100lb 4oz - peg 114
4. Chris Fox - 93lb 8oz - peg 132
5. Geoff Matthews - 92lb 9oz - peg 74
6. Paul Dare - 88lb 6oz - peg 115
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