A very busy week for me as I flew to Frankfurt on Monday for an exhibition, after a long week I got home Friday evening and was dog tired. Saturday had to collect my bait as well as Derek Coles, Steve Lovell and Rob Manns, the fridge was full! After watching the disaster of a 0-4 home loss at the Gas I was really happy to see Gloucestershire win the T20, my wife and daughter Lucy were there to celebrate with the players.
I felt very jaded Sunday morning and realised I had got a cold, so got some paracetamol in to me. Got to the draw and I was the only team member present, unfortunately we were going to be one man short today due to an emergency that occurred. Eventually my team mates started arriving after I had paid their pools, in amongst the crowd of anglers I spied good mate Martin Reyatt. This made me laugh as he told me he’d never fish the river again lol.
Team draw done and we had one flier end peg at Swineford, Steve Lovell was on that. I was on D7 at Jack Whites, middle of this section is not good normally. It was a good yomp to get to the peg, including having to negotiate a kissing gate. I walked past some real good pegs and then saw Andy Britt on D6 who was also not happy with the peg. However, when I finally found my peg (I had walked past it) I was properly pissed off, this was a peg I always leave out as it is full of snags. Just to make things better an otter surfaced to my left and then swam downstream.
My options were now very limited and a couple of calls to other anglers confirmed the situation. I set up a 4AAA waggler with 0.15 to 16 N50 to pull hard on any chub. A gbait feeder with 0.17 to 14 N50 and lastly a 6m whip.
We started at 10:15 and there was no balling in gbait on this peg for me. By casting a long way down the peg I avoided any snags and had 25 minutes on the feeder getting some bait in and caught a chublet and a roach on it. Went onto the waggler (fished 3 feet deep) which I had been feeding and was able to catch some chublets from 4oz to 12oz. But they soon went, I went down to 0.13 and an 18 but it didn’t make any difference as the chublets were now right up under the trees and impossible to reach.
After trying the feeder again for 1 perch I tried the whip line, first run down I had a 8oz perch. Second run down snag and rig ended up in the tree. Poxy peg, I was 2 feet off the bottom and snagged, I gave up on the whip.
Back on the waggler and I started to get the odd bite from bleak and small roach, but I needed to fine down, so 0.10 to a 20 went on which made a difference and I got a lot more bites. I also had to go deeper as the match went on, getting to 6 1/2 feet seemed best. The only problem was the fish were so small, but as I heard the section wasn’t fishing great I just carried on. Changing the colour of the maggot on the hook was needed, but probably caught most on bronze. In the last half hour I had a couple of chublets out of the blue, and they actually started showing themselves under the trees after the match.
My match was done, I thought I had 9lb, Andy reckoned he had 7lb. I’d had a busy day on the waggler but just not enough quality. In the end the section was quite tight but Leigh Wakefield won A div with 13lb, he had 3 chub with a couple of hours to go to bump his weight up. Mike Kent won my B div with 12lb 9oz, he had a good run of chublets that made the difference. My fish went 10lb 6oz which I was happy with, and was surprised to come third in the section from this peg.
Overall the match was won easy by Lee Warden at the top of Chequers straight who had 12 chub and a bream on the waggler plus roach for 38lb 6oz. A fantastic weight and Lee said it was one of his best days on the river.
There was a tie for second with Andy Powell and Martin Reyatt, MR drawing the outfall at Swineford and catching 5 bream but not on pellets or meat 😂😂
Full results and team results are below, but that’s enough typing now as I need some sleep. No fishing for the next couple of weeks for me.
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