As I was enjoying the wine my teammates were slugging it out on the Gloucester canal in round 1 of the winter league. They had a bit of a tough time and came 4th out of 6 teams, the pressure was on this weekend in round 2 on the Thames around Radcot. I’m certainly not in tune with this river like my local river and it definitely needs a refined approach for the roach.
Team drawn was done by Charlie Isaacs who was going to have a watch today, he put me on F3 below Radcot. It was the better end of the section and on the Thames champs peg 2 had 17lb of roach I believe. The wooden footbridge to get to the river is currently closed for repair, so we had to drive through a field and park in long grass, then get the gear over a kissing gate. Not a long walk for me and plenty of time to set up.
My peg was on a bit of a bend, the flow was all this side of the river and across was dead still, but I could see lots of little fish topping over there. I set up a waggler for this with 0.10 to a 20, but this was only in case my pole lines were not working. I had three rigs for my gbait pole line; a 0.5g strung rig, a 0.8 rig and a 1.2g for holding the bait still. Also set up a 1g rig for chopped worm. My roach rigs had 20 to 0.8 and the worm a 14 to 0.17. As ever in this league you’ve got good anglers fishing, either side I had Phil Bendall on peg 2 and Jon Tocknell on peg 4. Add to that Gary Williamson, Mick Gale and Ricky Searle.
We started at 11am and I cupped 5 balls of gbait caster and hemp onto my long pole line, then fed a couple of chop worm lines. I started on the worm lines, but 20 minutes later hadn’t had a bite. Went onto my gbait line trying a caster on the hook, I had 2 roach in 20 minutes, so back to the worms where I had 3 perch up to 8oz. After an hour Phil already had 35 fish and was netting roach regularly. I was doing my nut in trying and failing to catch roach over my gbait. I had tried maggots and pinkie on the hook and added a few small dace and 1 net roach.
I gave the waggler a go to put something in the net, I knew I would catch as every time I fed a pouch of maggots across the water erupted. It was tiny chublets, bleak and dace. It was solid but they were tiny fish so I gave it 20 minutes then back to the pole where I had topped up. With nearly 2 hours gone I finally started to catch some nice roach, the only bait I could catch them on was pinkie. I reckon I had them for about 40 minutes and then they were gone again. I had a couple more perch on the worm after this but that was the last action on worms.
The rest of my match was spent catching sprats on the waggler and then trying the pole for roach. I didn’t get many roach, and knew I was miles behind Phil and Gary so kept the small stuff coming to put something in the net. I tried hemp a few times but never got a bite. I was quite happy when the match finished lol.
Here’s my weigh board, as you can see Phil smashed it catching 21lb 6oz, he caught on casters and hemp. On peg 1 Gary had roach on hemp and tares. My 9lb 8oz scraped me third just beating Mick Gale.
My fish today.
Back at the results it was not looking great for the team, with just one section winner and a second. We ended up 4th again, with DGL winning again.
Phil won the match and Gary was second meaning I got the section win money by default 😊😊. That was a nice surprise. Ian Paulley was our top angler he came third with 16lb of mainly roach.
Right now the league is
DGL 2
Talismen 5
Lobbies 5
Thatchers 8
Devizes 10
GBV 12
Next Sunday is an open at Chippenham and Melksham for practice for the next round. Not expecting it to be great with little flow and clear water.
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