Back at it again after a weekend off, but a fair bit has gone on since then. I went to Benidorm with my wife for four days, we went to celebrate Simon Alders 50th birthday. I’ve known Simon since the Silver Dace juniors and although he doesn’t match fish he still loves fishing. I think there were around 16 of us all told including Shaun Townsend who could drink for England! In the picture are the anglers in the Dorm, Tyler (Simon’s son), Towner, Simon and I’m the slim one on the right 😂.
We got back Monday and all was good, until later that evening when I started coughing. I went downhill every day and ended up in bed a lot of the time, must have been flu as I tested negative twice for covid. I still wasn’t right when I woke up Sunday morning, and had to take sinutabs to clear my head and chest. I was the last to the draw and nothing to do with alcohol! Only 5 teams of 4 as only Jack whites and Chequers were booked, and I was headed for Jack Whites for a change.
It takes a while to get to your pegs because of the damn kissing gates making you have to unload your trolley and load it again. I was on C4 which is the new peg cut out this year, not for the faint hearted mind. A steep bank with reeds at the bottom where I put my platform in.
The bank is far too steep to allow the use of a pole, so I set up a 12BB crowquill with 18 to 0.11 accupower, a waggler and a feeder rod. I very carefully got everything down the bank and mixed up my gbait Sonubaits black river and roach. I was just forming my initial balls of gbait when the all in was shouted. Both Rob Jones below, and Derek Coles above, balled it in just before I did. That’s three matches on the trot Derek has been next peg to me!
I began on the crowquill with a caster on the hook and it was a good start seeing regular bites but they were annoyingly hard to hit. I swung in a few roach and dace and 1 perch before the caster was ignored. Maggot on the hook revived things but the roach were virtually non existent and this wasn’t a good sign. Catching Dace on a crowquill is challenging as sometimes you pull your hair out missing bites, but it pays to change things around and keep working at it. I found out my section was fishing hard and so I knew that I should keep plodding away. The wind was doing its best to ruin things and trying to get control was at times impossible for more than a few seconds, but at least it wasn’t in my face.
With 2 hours to go the swim was really hard work and I was priming a waggler line down and across with maggots. You can’t really fish that far across as there is a massive snag 2/3 over, you can see it from the top of the bank. Rob had taken a small chub and was probably in front of me with 90 mins left. I looked for a chub on the waggler but only had 1 bleak. I did manage to catch a handful more roach and dace on the crow, even though a small pike grabbed 2 I got them both out. A couple came from fishing it over the waggler line, with my best fish a 5 to 6 ounce dace.
Match over Rob told me he had caught next to nothing the last 90 minutes, and it was sounding closer than I thought. On the end peg Dean Harvey had 1lb 6oz, next Ben Matthews 2lb 12oz, Rob had 5lb 15oz, then my bag went 6lb 9oz, and Derek had 3lb. Finally a proper section win after two defaults lol. This section was the hardest on the day, but above us the top 3 pegs by the steps all had double figures.
Picture below shows the overall top 2 and the section winners. Paul Purchase returned from Australia to draw the end peg at Chequers and do what he does and bagged up on roach, nice one.
It was a bit tight on the team front with 4 teams all joint on 13 points! As my team were one of them it means we retain the lead at The halfway mark. Next match is 30th October.
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