Lake 2, Monks - Hather's forum bash

Today was a forum match organised by super-model Mark Hathway from across the border in Surrey. Mark is well known around the south east, not so much for his fishing but for his spectacularly disgusting shorts and he rounded up a very good group of 23-24 anglers from various angling forums. The venue was Lake 2 at Monks on a very hot and still day and upon arrival there was talk of it not fishing too well due to the lake being like a sheet of glass. I however was buzzing because of the wonderful weather and hopeful of a good days fishing.

Before the fishing though there was time for an egg butty and a bit of banter with some of the guys I haven’t seen for a while. On board was Justin Case (Paul Law for all those that want to know who jumped in head-first at last week’s Fisho), Squeaky Roller, M T Net and far too many more to mention.

At the draw Mark had organised the pegs according to the anglers that had turned up and for once I had the chance of drawing my own peg as I was not helping with the draw. Out popped 77 quickly followed by the obvious heckling that I was bound to win the watch from ‘that flyer’…………I’ve heard THAT one before lol. For company on 76 I had the match organiser himself which was defo worth a good banter session and behind me Orpington Pete and Bill ‘paste-head’ Gibbins. Nick Gilbert had drawn bobbins at 54 and was well out of the way of any banter………..although all of us over our side of the lake distinctly heard the sound of cracking carbon coming from his lonely corner!

Anyway, on with the fishing: I recently posted a blog about fishing lake 2 in a different style but didn’t mention what bait I was using as I wanted to give it another crack first, so today was my chance to try shallow maggot again and I had 6 pints with me along with 2 pints of 4mm pellet and a small tin of corn as back-up. I also took 1kg of pre-mixed groundbait for balling in and another 1kg dry bag just in case I needed it.

Having never drawn an end peg on lake 2 I wondered whether I should fish around the corner towards the bridge where perhaps all the fish were holding out but to be honest I was very keen to test my shallow maggot theory out which would need to be at about 7m out in front. I therefore opted to do this and leave the corner for later on if I needed it, if the fish were there anyway then I doubted that they would bugger off.

Rigs today therefore were as follows:

An NG Dibber set 2’ deep with a group of no.8 shot half way down
An NG Finnesse set at dead depth out in front which would also do for the corner fishing a couple of inches over depth
An NG XT Margin for fishing towards the far bank around the corner

All rigs had Drennan size 16 Wide Gape hooks to 0.13 tied on to 0.16 Fox Micro+ rig line, the wide gape hooks were to easily take 3 maggots.

At the start I flicked out some maggots to identify the balling zone and threw in 4 jaffas making as much noise as possible. I then dropped my rig in, flicked out more maggots and took a 3oz skimmer on the drop. That must have been the quickest time I have ever landed a fish in a match!

Unfortunately after another skimmer and a couple of small chub things didn’t seem to be getting any better so I upped the feed rate to every 5 seconds. After about half an hour I had my first decent fish which was a Chub of around 2lb followed by another and then a nice 2lb Ide. The first Carp then showed up and things started to tick over nicely.

By the start of the second hour I had 25lb on my clicker and the fishing was becoming steadier with mostly Carp turning up, although it was in fits and spurts rather than continual. By the end of the 2nd hour I had started my second net but things were still steady and not exactly hectic.

A quick glance at my bait tray started me thinking, after 2 hours I was over half way through my maggots and would not be able to make them last if I wanted to keep the bigger Carp coming. Anticipating that I would run out by 3 o’clock I started to feed some 4mm pellets round the corner to my right. I kept the Carp coming out in front but had to maintain very frequent feeding to keep them there.

At around 2pm a breeze turned up and it was coming from 10 o’clock and making it very hard to get maggots out by hand. I persevered for 20 minutes hoping it might calm down but it didn’t. With about 90 minutes to go I decided to drop in round the corner with corn but the float didn’t move. There had been a lot of movement in the far side margin all day but I didn’t want to fish tight to it because I was concerned about foul hooking fish that were more interested in spawning than feeding. For this reason I was feeding in the middle but clearly the fish were not too interested in a few pellets and a bit of corn. I therefore made up 4 large balls of grounbait using up all of my wet mix and stuck 2 round the corner and 2 out on the shallow line to keep some fish there. A couple of handfuls of pellets went round the corner as well and the whole idea here was to draw away any fish that were at all interested in feeding and leave the spawning fish in the margins. First put-in and I had a Barbel, second put-in a foul hooked Barbel, third put in a foul hooked Carp and then another foul hooked Barbel. It seemed that I may have drawn too many fish in so I swapped my top kit from the doubled 8 to a single solid 16 to try and hold on to the foul hookers that liked to shoot off under the bridge. As I continued to feed pellet I began to get a lot more properly hooked fish until eventually I was catching steadily and things were looking ok for the rest of the match. The solid 16 helped to deal with those Barbel and also some very chunky Carp that were showing. In fact I hooked a lump just before the whistle and played it out slowly before slipping the net under the 8lb fish.

It was my job to be on the scales and therefore first to weigh in so I got someone else to shout it and 108 lb 8oz was called. Further down there were a couple of good weights from pegs that I always fancy including 82lb odd from Squeaky and a jammy 109lb odd from Jeff ‘chav jacket’ Driscol who must be man of the match for coming 2nd half way down the spit. I have said many times that you can win or frame along the spit and was pleased that good angling had proven the point today. I ended up with 3rd place and the winner came from peg 45 with 135lb 8oz so well done to Wayne.

So, I have been quite sure for a while now that shallow maggot was going to work well but the only problem is potentially running out if you need to feed hard to get the Carp up. I did have a pint or 2 left which I gave to Hathers because he was fishing another match here tomorrow and fancied trying the shallow maggot approach……………….147lb for 2nd place…………….nice!