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!
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