Vince Gould was organising the whole event and Nick Gilbert was the team captain and venue expert. The Maggotdrowner’s aim in these events is to keep up with tradition and come last so there was never any pressure on the day although Nick was running a super-pool which would be rather nice to have a slice of.
Having had a week of hot weather, we were all a bit concerned that the morning was very overcast and blustery. The pressure would have dropped considerably but I was still confident of a few fish and would stick with my usual shallow approach with one or two back-up methods on standby. Some of the blokes here have travelled a long way and have never fished Monks before and I offered a bit of advice to some of our team members. Anyone on the wrong end of lake 3 would need to scratch around for fish and anyone on lake 1 would need to be aggressive and steel fish from the end pegs or be aggressive if they drew an end peg.
So at the draw most of us were hoping for either the flyers on lake 3 or a decent draw on lake1. I pulled out peg 19 on lake 1 and had Nick Gilbert opposite me on peg 3. I also had Mark Hathaway a few pegs to my left and behind me on peg 24 was Matt Nutt in our team and he came over for a chat. He said that he would prefer to fish shallow so I suggested that he should ball it in and fish aggressively to draw fish away from flyer peg 23 to his left.
Apart from a couple of team members that had drawn well on lake 3, we didn’t look to have very many decent pegs so we would have to work hard for good points. I had already decided to fish aggressively and formed 6 large balls of ground pellet and crushed hemp to ball in at the start. I set up 2 shallow rigs with a new hand made dibber that I had asked Nick to make so this would be the first test for it. I have not seen a decent dibber in the shops so this was to be the ‘perfect’ shallow float. I also set up an ‘on the deck’ rig for my 7m shallow swim and a paste rig for the same line as well as a paste margin rig and an ‘on the deck’ margin rig. My plan would be to ball it in at 7m and fish shallow but would have the deck rig and paste rig ready if they wouldn’t come up. I would fish 6mm Skrettings shallow, 6mm soft hookers on the deck and ground expander paste. I also chose to feed 2mm pellets to my left and right hand margin swims and would fish either paste or Dendra over the top. I have had success here using worm in the margins for better stamp fish and was confident that I could pick up extra weight here if I needed it.
So when the whistle sounded I balled in the groundbait, fed the margins by hand and went out with the shallow rig set at 12” deep. For the first 10 minutes I concentrated on feeding 4-6 pellets every 5 seconds to get the fish up quickly. I watched across the lake to see if anyone was catching close in. I know Nick usually fished the margins early on while his shallow line builds up but I didn’t see him land a single fish so I stayed on the shallow rig and kept feeding. During the first 20 minutes I had a couple of dips but soon decided to go deeper and set the depth to 18” and started to catch small Chub. Soon the Carp were having a go and by the end of the first hour I guessed at less than 10lb in the net but was probably ahead of everyone else that I could see.
I noticed that my swim was fizzing and so either the fish were churning up the bottom or the hemp in my ground bait was causing it. As I was not exactly bagging on the shallow rig I decided to take a look on the bottom with a soft hooker. After 10 minutes I had one small Chub so had a look on the paste rig. Neither the soft paste or stiff paste could buy me a proper bite, just liners and nibbles so I went back out with the shallow rig as I had kept feeding the swim little and often. I seemed to be catching the odd Chub and Carp but felt that these were just fish that I was managing to draw up shallow. The thought occurred to me that maybe they were ‘mid water’ so I added a foot of line to my rig and slid the float up until I was now 2’ deep. Immediately I picked up Carp at a better rate and things started to look better as everyone else around me seemed to be having a very rough time.
This didn’t last for long though as during the third hour the peg just died. I also noticed that Nick had set up a waggler rod so things must have been tough over on the far bank. I had kept feeding the margins and it was now time to utilize plan C and on went a Dendra which I dropped into my left hand margin which looked the more ‘fishy’ of the 2. I didn’t have a sniff so I dropped the rig into the right hand margin and immediately had a Golden Tench around 12oz. Another drop in saw another Golden Tench come to the net but the swim needed a good handful of pellets after every fish. Soon I needed to top up my bait box as I was catching well. I recall a match earlier in the year where I got through about 4 pints of casters in the last hour and a half just by plundering the margins and this seems to be a good trick on this lake. I kept putting in handfuls of the 2mm pellets and the fish started to get bigger. A few Carp obliged and then came along the Barbel until the whistle went and I took my time landing the last fish which was probably my biggest of the day.
There was a lot of moaning around the lake as it seemed that many had struggled. I wondered how the aerator pegs had fished because I was sure that I had beaten every other peg on my side of the lake. The scales came around and weights went between 6lb and 30 odd. I reckoned on 38lb in my net but the scales pushed round to 48lb 8oz which I was pleased with but not for long as the aerator peg weighed in 70lb.
The back half of lake 1 seemed to fish better with a few weights around the 60 – 80lb mark. Matt Nutt weighed in exactly the same as me fishing the same method and lake 3 produced the expected ton plus weights but how would we fair in the points stakes?
Back at the café the guys rounded up and told stories of woe. Trevor Little had run out of paste having bagged up for the first 4 hours, Peter Mortan had done well but got beaten by a small margin and the rest had similar stories to tell. It wasn’t looking good and as the results came in it was apparent that we had failed miserably to come last and had to settle for 3rd place with Angling Forums taking top spot. Well done lads! All I could achieve was 2nd in section and another £10 for my pools bank account but I did manage to beat everyone on my side of the lake apart from the flyer aerator peg 22!
Lake 1 fished very poorly indeed and I can only put it down to the sudden change in weather. The following day it fished much better so I guess the fish had settled down by then.
The dibber that I was trying out performed well, better than anything else I have tried although I have asked Nick if he can make them a little bigger and heavier as they tended to get caught a little in the surface tension. The use of 2 pellet bands as top rubbers worked very well as they are very stretchy and the line doesn’t cut through them, nor are they so tight that the line cuts into the float when you slide it up and down. I am sure the next batch will be spot on!
Oh, I forgot to mention the red shoes! Everyone knows I fish in red so I thought I would tempt a few jokes seeing as it was going to be a day full of banter. I think some of the other teams were more worried about the shoes than my fishing ability but the distraction seemed to work lol!
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