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.