Evesham

Back up again for the midweek qualifier. This time C7 was Peg 1. Up until maybe two years ago this was an ATM. Every time an angler went here they came away with money. On the right river they would obliterate the opposition with Bream. But even on a non-Bream river there were probably half a dozen methods which singly or in combination would guarantee 6Lbs on a hard day and 10Lbs on a better day. So the normal outcome would be that the peg would win or frame, and in the unusual event that this was not the case then it would take the section straight out or by default anyway.

Sadly this is no longer the case. It threw up 24Lbs of Bream on Opening Day, but since that has only registered a low weight framing position and a default section pick-up. So I went to my peg with a fairly clear idea that peg 7 would frame and it could be between me and my team mate Kev Ellaby on peg 2 for the section pickup. I was also clear in my mind that attempting to fish my breadpunch/hemp appriach would only result in Tourettes, because the peg is (in)famous for its Pike and the steep bank slows down the shipping back allowing the Pike plenty of time to zero in.

So I set up a light stick to fish over loose fed maggot (in hindsight, a 5m whip might have been better), a 3AAA wag to fish about 1/3rd over, and two 3g flatfloat rigs to fish worm over choppie at 13m (one light worm, the other with riot gear on). Fed short, droppered in some choppie and caster long and came back inside on the stick. Plenty of bites for the first hour but I felt a bit of a busy fool. Small Bleak, very small Pommies, the odd small Dace or Roach, only a solitary Perch. I thought I was running at something like 12 to 16oz/hour, but I could see that I wasn’t going to carry that through the full match. I had a look on the wag and after a surprising lack of response (no small Bleak, Chublets etc.) the float buried down the peg and I hooked a Chub. I played it carefully and sure enough it had a look at the upstream pandocks but I steered it back carefully and lifted it expecting to see the onion ring. No onion ring, it was an angry Perch about 10oz!! But that was it on the wag, so I dropped in with the worm on my choppie line, and eventually got a response in the shape of a small Eel. Dropped in again and after another wait I lifted on a bite and all hell let loose because I was now playing what I soon realised was the resident alligator. Fortunately I got a rather catatonic Perch back. It was a bit quiet in choppie land after that, and my inside line was now very hard work so I chucked the tip over my wag line and managed to strangle a reasonable Perch. A second perch on that line was snaffled by my pet alligator and I ended up having to freespool it while I worked out how to knock the anti-reverse off. Sadly that Perch was a goner. So then I switched back to the wag and out of the blue managed to hook 5 Roach in 6 or 7 runs. I landed 4 but ended up sacrificing the 5th to Jaws And then to finish off a busy but also frustrating match I dropped back inside and picked up some krill before having a ‘shall I swing it/shall I net it/oh doesn’t matter now because it’s dropped off’ moment with a 3oz Roach, and then went on to catch a couple of the dumpy Perch that were totally absent earlier on.

All of the above saw me dropping 3-14-0 on the scales which was trumped by Kev’s 4-4-0 who took the default section money so I was 11th overall, 3rd in section and received a big thanks for coming. Overall the venue is now really starting to show the pressure coupled with the desperate need for some rain to generate flow and colour, or alternatively some settled warm weather to create an algae bloom. The same 4 or 5 pegs are dominating every match with the pegs in between proving to be challenging to put it mildly. Lots of 1Lb+ type weights today.