1st Invicta Match League - Round 5 - Nick's Lake, Hartley Lands 25-05-08

Today was a match that I had been looking forward to for 2 reasons, firstly the weather should be pretty good at this time of year making things less peggy than in previous matches and secondly because I could adopt 1 of 2 methods that I am quite confident with, namely the pellet waggler or method feeder.

The forecast was not good though and it seemed that the bank holiday weekend would be dominated by rain and wind. Having switched on the TV Sunday morning to watch out for the weather while loading my car, the forecast was that the rain would blow over and by 10.00 am things should brighten up. I was unsure if the pellet waggler would work well today so the previous night I knocked up some method-mix and some paste.

At the draw we were all looking at the skies wondering if things would clear up or whether we would once again have the choice of getting wet or trying to fish under a brolly!

The draw began with Trevor Little pulling out a peg for me and a peg for Nick. I had 15 and Nick had 35 and I think it was fair to say that I was the happiest although neither of us had a peg that we felt could do well. One of our guests for the day, Nick Coster AKA ‘Bag Up’, drew peg 3 which we didn’t think was particularly good until we all marched off around the lake walking past peg 3 and seeing Carp climbing up the side of the island!

As I arrived at my peg my heart was lifted a little as I saw that I had about a 25 yard chuck to the end of an island and with a breeze from the right I should still be able to feed pellets by catty quite easily. I also recall that Nick had come 2nd on the lake in a big match last summer from around peg 13 or 14 so if the weather were to pick up a little I might do well on the waggler. However, as I was unsure of the weather, I would set up 3 rods, a pellet waggler, a method feeder and a flattened bomb for fishing a conker up the shelf of the island, I also had a top 5 set up for fishing paste down the edge later in the match.

Nick decided to wander round for a chat although I am quite sure he just wanted to make fun of the 3 rods I had set up all having matching Daiwa TDR reels. Nick bought a few Daiwa’s from the USA and he reckons they are at least as good as the TDRs we get over here but cost him only £60 each rather than the £110 each I paid.

As the start of the match approached, the clouds parted and as the sun began to push through I took off my jacket and hoody to cool down. With a few minutes to go before the ‘all-in’ it was like someone had waved a magic wand and I looked at my island swim with a little grin on my face and Nick and I agreed, pellet wag all day long!!!

At this point we were both subjected to a little banter from John Haigh who insisted that he could beat ‘the pellet waggler boys’ with his floating MAP Rocket feeder. A £1 side bet was taken as Nick refused to hear of such nonsense and we all went back to our pegs ready for the ‘all-in’.

By the way, my pellet waggler rod had one of Dave Brittain’s styro wagglers on it for me to try out for the first time. I have fished the pellet waggler before and am reasonably confident with it but last year I was using KC Silverback wagglers which are made from balsa. Dave Brittain had given me a bundle of his own styro wagglers when he stopped over a few weeks back and he insisted that they are more buoyant than balsa and do not dive as much on landing. I also had some of Nick Gilbert’s home made balsa wagglers with me so maybe I would get a chance to compare them.






As Nick called the ‘all-in’ I fired out 2 pouches of 6mm skrettings and chucked out the styro waggler to within a foot of the island. I put the rod down to pick up the catty and the tip went straight round nearly pulling it off the top ring of the keepnet (I always put the rod down at an angle so the tip goes round just like using a feeder rod). The first fish of the day was in the net followed by another and another and so on. The sport continued so rapidly that I hardly had a chance to feed. The normal feeding pattern for this method would be feed, cast, feed, bite, retrieve, feed, land fish, feed, cast and so on. I was getting so many fish though that all I could manage was feed, cast, grab rod, retrieve, feed, land fish, feed, cast. I suppose it just felt like I wasn’t able to feed enough but the action was so fast maybe I shouldn’t have been too worried.

So in the first hour I had about 20-25 fish in the net and was going strong. I could see John to my right catching but not as quickly and Colin to my left was lobbing out a method feeder and catching a few. The sport continued into the 2nd hour and I was still having trouble feeding enough. I was just nervous that the fish were coming so quickly that they might disappear if I couldn’t hold them there with enough pellets going in. At one point I knocked my catty into the drink coz my rod was nearly pulled in but I had another 5 on stand by which was good because soon I busted the elastic in catapult number 2. Another time I was rushing so much I picked up a 11/2 lb carp out of the net and dropped it back in the lake having missed the keepnet! Things were frantic to say the least.

By the end of hour 3 my clicker read 82 fish. Now I was aware that the average size of fish was probably a little smaller than I would have expected. You normally need 80 fish for 100lb here but my guess was the average weight would be 1lb therefore giving me 80lb of fish so far. I was however very confident that I would be doing well because I just couldn’t see how anyone could be catching faster than me, it was just too frantic. Even though I had 82 fish in the net I still could have had more because I had probably pulled out of 10 fish in the first 3 hours. I’m not sure why, I was using a longer hair than normal because this had been recommended to me but this seemed to work well having hooked more fish than I would normally expect. Maybe the PR27 hooks I was using were not so sharp or even blunting after a few fish. I had been warned about this before.

The sport continued however but just a little slower as by the end of hour 4 I had 97 fish split between 2 nets. My average had gone down from 27 fish an hour to 24! At around this time disaster struck as I landed a fish together with a birds nest attached to it and my rig was trashed. I don’t think I have ever tied a rig so quick in my life! I think it took me about 4 minutes to put on a new float, shot it and attach a new hook length and this included stopping every 30 seconds to feed the swim. As I was rummaging through my waggler tray I decided to put on one of Nick’s balsa wagglers to try and compare the performance with the styro waggler I had been using.
At this point I also decided to chuck a 3rd keepnet in because it doesn’t hurt to be careful and ensure the fish are looked after. I was absolutely sweating my nuts off by now with the speed of everything and the fact that the sun had been beating down all day.



So on with the fishing. The 5th and final hour saw a down-turn in the action. I wasn’t getting many rod benders and not hitting most of the dips. I tried casting around the peg and picked off a few fish further out from the island but it seemed that the best plan was to get closer to the island so I started chucking the waggler so far that it would actually hit the side of the island and bounce back down into the drink. This worked but of course it wasn’t every cast that was as accurate as this. Often I would have to bring the rig back in, re-feed and re-cast to get it closer.

At the end of the match my clicker registered 109 fish so I only managed a further 12 fish in the final hour. I thought that if I was lucky I might have 120lb but deep down I knew that my fish were small and I didn’t set my hopes higher than 100lb. The scales moved around the lake with Nick Gilbert weighing in a very impressive 117lb for 80 odd fish from an un-fancied peg. It sounded like he struggled for the first few hours and finally managed to steel some fish from adjacent pegs. Nick asked me how I did and I told him that I had 109 fish but they were small. He looked a little shocked and was convinced I had 130lb but I refused his estimate. So at my peg several weigh-ins were totted up to give me a grand total of 111lb. Russ Evans on peg 9 had about 107lb and it was looking like I had 2nd place behind Nick until it got to our guest for the day who had chucked out a method feeder on peg 3 and weighed in very nice 125lb. It was clear that the top end of the lake was now fishing well due to the weather and I suppose I was a little disappointed to come 3rd but at least I won my section giving me maximum points and 5th in the league, not bad considering that after the disastrous 1st match I only had 1 point and was joint last out of 20 blokes!

By the way, with 2nd, 3rd and 4th places going to the pellet waggler, I’m not quite sure what happened to the floating feeder boys :~)

So once again I look back with hindsight and wish I hadn’t lost those 10 fish and dropped one back in the pond instead of the keepnet. I think I will change the type of hook I am using for the hair rig and see if my results get better. Also, I don’t really think I had long enough to make a fair comparison between the styro and balsa wagglers but I will say that I was very happy with the styro but maybe I need a little more time to judge properly.

Another issue that I still have to resolve is the same problem I experienced a few weeks ago at Monk lakes fishing shallow. The hair on my rigs suffers kinking after a while and I probably changed my hook length 6 times during today’s match. Below are photos of before and after!


Before:



After:



I tried taking up a couple of suggestions but they didn’t work so my plight for perfection goes on……………………..

1st Invicta League Round 4 - Monk Lakes 1 - 18/05/08

Having won my last match at Monks (although it was on lake 2) I would have been quite confident of doing well today but the weather had been poor during the week and match weights here yesterday were very poor indeed. Yesterday I fished a match on lake 2 but the day was so hard and uneventfull that there would be little to write about other than to say that the only way I could catch was to lob out a method feeder!

At the end of yesterday's match I decided that I would need something other than pellets today but the only natural bait I had was 1/4 kilo of worm. Luckily one of the guys at yesterday's match had several pints of casters on him so I bought 4 pints in the hope that today I could catch on worm or caster.

At the draw I pulled out peg 5 which was at least a short walk if not an average peg. To my right and in my section was the league leader Mark Holland and also in my section was Mark Hathaway so things were not going to be easy! At my peg I set up the following rigs:

1 A Maver Margin float to fish the inside at the start
2 A K C Carpa Chimp for my 10m line
3 A 'Scone' shallow float in case I could get them up in the water
4 A 4AAA Peacock waggler

As I was setting up my gear the weather was not looking too bad although the wind was blowing like merry hell and at Monks you are about 15' up in the air so wind can play a very important part in a match by affecting presentation! The further up the bank you went the more choppy the water became and even though I was only 5 pegs along, it looked like presentation would be difficult.

Having finished setting my gear up the clouds thinned out a little and as the sun pushed through and warmed us up a bit I noticed the distinct figure of Russ Evans taking things easy by having a quick snooze by his peg.



When Nick called the 'all in' I fed a handfull of casters in the margins each side of me and shipped out 2 cups of casters with a golf ball sized lump of green Swimstim on my 10m line. I picked up the margin rig and tried out both margin swims while flicking a few casters over the top. After about half an hour all I had managed was a few small Ide and so I shipped out another cup of feed to the 10m line and picked up the Carpa Chimp rig. I realised right away that having the rig set at dead depth was just going to allow it to be pushed through by the wind and tow so I increased the depth by 6", put on a back-shot and took off my bottom number 10 dropper.
I had the shot spread out to fish on the drop so that I could detect if the fish were coming up in the water but the wind was still dragging the rig so I moved all of the shot down, spread it out over 12" and ensured that the bottom 2 no.8's were dragging bottom. This slowed the rig up a little and I manged to put a few fish in the net but only skimmers and the odd carp.

With about and hour and a half gone I estimated around 5lb in the net so things were not going well. To my right Mark Holland was managing a few carp and easily beating me. I was keeping my eye on him because he is leading the league and nearly always fishes the pole so I was interested to see what his approach would be.

By now I couldn't buy a bite on the 10m line so I added a section on and started to ping casters over the top. This brought another couple of fish but again it went dead. I looked over to my rod holdall and contemplated getting out the method feeder that I had caught on the day before but to be honest this seemed far too drastic. I therefore picked up the waggler rod and fished out at 20m but the wind just made feeding a nightmare. I looked once again at the rod holdall but just couldn't bring myself to sit on the tip for the rest of the match!

I had a re-think and because the wind was really howling and making presentation very poor as well as making it hard to hold the pole, I decided to feed a line at 6m with soft expanders and also feed caster heavily into the margins in the hope that fish would turn up later in the day. Half an hour on the 6m line didn't even produce a touch so with an hour and a quater to go I picked up the margin rig again and dropped in with half a worm. I had less than 10lb in my net for sure so I was now desperate!

As soon as the float settled it slid under and a nice 1lb Ide was in the net, then another, then a 1lb Barbel, then a 1lb Tench and it kept going and going and going. I was now building up a nice weight and the Barbel really switched on along with the odd carp. I looked at my watch and saw that I had an hour to go, I then looked at my casters and saw that I had about 2 pints left so I went for it 'big time'. A pinch of casters at every drop in and a handfull as soon as I had hooked a fish and drawn it away from the swim.

This continued until the end of the match and I estimated around 23lb in my net. I thought that I might have had more than Mark Holland who I didn't see land a single fish for the last hour or so. I helped Nick do the weigh-in and as we got round to my section it turned out that I beat Mark and also 2 other guys with a very reasonable 33lb 10oz. Only Mark Hathaway beat me in my section with a massive 60lb net which also won the day so I won the £20 section money by default and took home 4 points out of a maximum 5. I was VERY happy.

Monk Lakes charity open 10/05/08

Finaly the sun had arrived. We seem to have skipped spring and gone straight into summer and the weather has been good for over a week now. Things were therefore looking up for this open match as not only could I enjoy the warmth but the fish were likely to be shallow as well.

I arranged to meet Nick Gilbert at the draw and also bumped into some other familiar faces, one or two of them well known for big weights on this venue.

We paid our money and drew pegs, Nick on 36 and me on 74. Not good! Nick was up the wrong end of lake 1 and I was on the wrong side of lake 2. I had paid into the superpool so my first thought was that I had just wasted a tenner! I did offer to swap pegs with Nick but he wouldn't hear of it and so I unloaded my gear and walked to my peg. As I was setting up my gear, Dave Baptist came up for a chat and told me he was on peg 47. Great, one of the best anglers here is 2 pegs up from an out-and-out flyer! It was going to be a foregone conclusion, 22 or 23 would win lake 1 and 45 - 47 would win lake 2 with any of these taking the overall coin.

Now I don't mind saying that when I came back to fishing last year, I needed to catch up very quickly with new baits and methods and I have tapped Nick for a lot of information over the past few months. We often talk about pellet waggler tactics and also fishing shallow on the pole so I guess I am more confident fishing shallow than fishing paste or pellet on the deck. Also, I think fishing shallow is a very attacking method and can beat other methods on it's day and today looked perfect for it, so shallow pole was going to be my primary approach with a couple of paste rigs as a back-up plan.

I plumbed up at a distance that I could easily throw pellets and found around 4' at 8.5m and set a KC Carpa Cocker at that depth. I also plumbed up along the margins and found about 2' and set up a shallow KC Carpa Cocker as well. Then I set up my main rig which was a 0.2g BGT Dibber-lite set to around 12" deep with the shot grouped right under the float.

All of my rigs consisted of 0.16 main line and 0.14 hook length with PR27 hooks tied with a knotless knot, the shallow rig having a hair rigged 3.2mm Gardner pellet band on a 16 hook and the paste rigs having a size 12.

For this match the organiser signalled a 15 minute pre-baiting period and so I sat there throwing pellets out every 10 seconds until the horn sounded for the all-in. Out went the rig and I continued to chuck out a few pellets every few seconds to trigger the fish into feeding up in the water and began to plop the rig in every few seconds. The guy to my left started to catch in the margins straight away and as I was only catching around 1 fish every 10 minutes I felt an urge to drop into the margins while still feeding my shallow line. I chose not to though. I didn't want to take the focus off of my shallow swim because I thought it would need 100% concentration. I also thought that his margin swim would probably dry up anyway and hopefully by concentrating on my shallow swim I could get it boiling later on.

So with the first hour over I had about 7 fish in the net and things weren't going very well at all. The guy to my left probably had 20 - 25 fish but it looked like things were slowing down for him. At about this time I decided to start slapping the rig harder on the surface and this seemed to trigger a better response. Bites were coming quicker and I put around 15 fish in the net in the second hour, including 3 Ide and 1 Tench!

Half way through the match I was comfortable that my peg was now fizzing and the guys either side of me just couldn't keep up. I foul-hooked a carp and immediately shallowed up to 6", actually it was probably 8" because the float and the loops must have been 2" on top of a 6" trace. This gave me more line between the float and the pole and now I began to really motor. I was slapping the rig hard left and right and feeding every 20 seconds or so and this seemed to keep the fish coming. After 3 hours my tally was up to about 40 fish and most of them went just over a pound so I wasn't going to win it but maybe I could frame on my lake.

The 4th hour was much like the 3rd but maybe a bit slower, now and then I even stopped feeding and just kept slapping at odd fish cruising past. I must have mugged about 6 fish off of the surface! Steadily I built up my weight and the fish seemed to get going again in the last hour until for about the last 15 minutes I was probably catching 1 fish every 2 minutes. So I finished on 1 Tench, 3 Ide and 68 Carp for around 80 - 90 lb.

The scales moved around the hot pegs and so far the top weight on my lake was 100lb and 7oz. The guy to my left weighed in an impressive 80lb and I thought that I must have more than him and when the scales got to me I was surprised to see a total of 114lb against my name on the clip board. It looked like I was going to win my lake.

As I walked back to the car with my gear someone told me that Nick had weighed in a very decent 112lb from his peg so it looked like I would be taking a £1 off him. When I caught up with Nick back at the cars he was adament that he had the highest weight on his lake and that the end flyers had not produced. Sure enough back at the tent it was confirmed that I had won overall and ended up taking home the 1st place pool money, the 1st place super-pool, a bottle of bubbly, a trophy and I even had the cheak to win a nice watch in the raffle. Nick took 2nd place overall and won his lake so he went home with a few quid as well although he might stop giving me advice if I'm not careful! Actually, I forgot to ask him if he went into the superpool!


So this was a good day indeed with a few decent scalps taken off of a very unfancied peg! In hindsight, I was glad that I did not get distracted by someone catching more than me on the inside, I made the right decision there. I also learnt a few things like slapping the rig hard and having a longer line above the float. One thing I do need to get sorted out though is the fact that the hair seems to coil up after a few fish and I needed to change my hook length about 6 times. I was also hitting about 1 bite in 6 or 8 at times and I need to understand if this is normal or is there something else wrong with my rig? I am worried that maybe my hairs are not long enough and so I think I will tie some up longer for next weekend as I have 2 more matches to fish at Monks!