Change of venue for this week’s midweek match. Evesham is now fishing extremely hard due to low clear conditions and the cumulative impact of angling pressure, so I opted for the Staverton event instead. Attendance is holding up well, 29 this week (and Evesham of course is dropping, 42 this week).
The draw put me back on peg 44 where I’d been beaten up by Chub on the first match in the series, so I fancied a rematch. To that end, I fished short with a 6m whip over groundbait to stay well clear of my waggler line. I caught reasonably well for an hour on maggot feeding small knobs of groundbait but it was already fading when I had my first tussle with a Pike. I then wasted the next hour trying to revive the swim and trying hemp and tare (plenty of bites, no fish!!!) before I gave up and went across where I’d been pinging caster from the start. I had the usual quick response from small Chublets before that died off but I was still getting some Bleak action lower down the swim. A good half hour on that line resulted in no sign of any proper Chub, so I dropped back inside and gave the hemp and tare another chance and actually managed to hit the odd bite now, mainly small Roach but I did have a couple of better stamp fish. But I was getting a ridiculous number of missed bites, which could only have been very small fish having a go, something I’ve witnessed before at Evesham.
With 75 minutes left I’d come to the conclusion that I was headed for about 4Lbs+ if I carried on on the seed, and there was the ever present risk that if I did get them lined up the Pike would become an issue, so I switched back to the waggler to see if I could nail some late Chub but with no success. I ended up weighing 3-6-0 with a 3-8-0 default section winner. No complaints though because that individual was big Kev Abigail who had had to weigh in early as he is still recovering, so didn’t begrudge him that small victory for a minute. And the reason it was a default section was that Tony Scott on peg 46 had packed away his pole gear at 7pm which he thought was the all-out only to realise that he was an hour premature. That left him with just his waggler rod set up which he duly chucked out and hooked 4 Chub, landing 3, in a 15 minute spell. 10 Lbs and a match win. Lovely! Neil Richards was second with 9-12-0 off peg 31, all Chub.
26 Year ITCH 