Woodstock

I spent Monday sulking about my abysmal performance on the Sedgie. Tuesday was a flurry of Evesham prep, cooking hemp, blitzing liccie and dyeing maggots, and when I’d finished that I decided I needed some slime therapy so I popped down to the Bettws Ponds for an afternoon session. In a totally radical departure from the norm I turned left and headed towards the canal side, settling down dead opposite the aerator on peg 6.

I set up an 0.4g rig to fish at 11m, and cupped in 2 large balls of Thatchers Dark Original plus some dead reds, casters, micros and corn. Dropped in initially with triple dead reds and boom! Second drop in I had a Bream. Two drops later another, then next drop in an obviously foul hooked one which pulled off and left me with a foot of slime up the rig. That killed the swim for a while but I still had another 3 by the end of the first hour, so definitely motoring. Subsequent hours were a bit slower and I was switching from bunches of dead reds to grains of corn to find the best response, but I kept picking up Bream in ones and twos, ending up with 13 eventually, plus a half dozen or so F1 C**p, some Roach including a few chunky samples, a Perch and 2 Gudgeon. I didn’t know there was Gudgeon in those ponds!

That was a much needed slime boost! Apparently the ambition for Woodstock is to develop it as a mixed F1 C**p and Bream fishery, and it does seem to be developing well in that direction. There will obviously be times when the F1s will tend to be a nuisance but today has shown that the right approaches can minimise that and maximise the slime potential. But I do need to get myself back over Morgans to have a play with feeder fishing.

King Sedgemoor Drain

My 4th visit to this venue over recent years, the other three have been more towards September and , to be fair, I’ve had good double figures twice and come close the other time. But this event is earlier in the year and the Drain is a bit more hit and miss.

Peg 11 in D section did well last week with 10Lbs or so on the back of 6 Skimmers and a Tench, but the area fished hard overall. So I had no illusions about what lay ahead, and was happy to target 5Lbs as a good section weight for the team. Set up a 3AA waggler, feeder rod, 1.5g heavy worm rig, 1g maggot rig, 1.5g maggot/worm rig and a 1g whip rig at 5m to hand. I kicked off by cupping 3 balls of feed with caster and some worm at 11m, bait droppering worm and caster to my left at 8m. and then dropped in with the whip over small nuggets of soft groundbait.

The whip got me a small Roach then a bigger Roach, followed by a motherless Minnow. Oh shit! Not a good sign. And in fact that was it on the whip line. A look with worm over the left hand worm line eventually produced a bumblebee. Shit! Fishing long with worm produced two bumblebees. Double shit!!

Fortunately I’d brought along some squat, and I found that feeding soft balls of groundbait laced with squat on my inside/whip line at least got me a few bites. Pommies, Roach, bumblebees and some Daddy Ruffe. But it wasn’t good and I was going nowhere fast. I chucked over towards the tree with a small g/bait feeder and worm with absolutely no respponse. And then at almost exactly the mid-point stage I dropped in long with worm, lovely slow bite, lifted and felt the thud of a Bream. Game on! Right gear/laccie etc., just play it out a bit then unship sections, bring it up and net it. So I did, played it out and dropped two sections and there it was gone! Pulled off! Worm was a bit over the bend of the hook but on a better day that wouldn’t have been a problem. Dropped back in but no action replay, so put two droppers of choppie in and had a look inside (useless) and on the tip (equally useless) before having another look long.

And that, as it turned out, was my last bite of the day. So I basically scraped last in section with 1-3-0. Peg 10 had 5Lbs+, he’d basically spent the match on the tip and had managed a couple of pulls. 1-14-0 to my left, but 14Lbs by the time you got to the end peg, as always it just got stronger and stronger.

So, with the benefit of hindsight, there’s no point in scratching for silvers on that section once you get to the open field (permanent peg 1), and it’s more sensible to fish for bonus fish on the tip or long pole. As they say, we catch or we learn.. Today was about learning.

Hendre Lake

‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again’……….What a load of tosh. I prefer ‘If you keep doing what you’re doing don’t be surprised if you keep getting what you’re getting’. On arrival at Hendre, I struggled to find a peg, due in part to C**p anglers deciding to spread themselves across two pegs. I eventually managed to squeeze in on peg 10 to the left of two ‘proper’ anglers who had been there all day. Apparantly they’d caught Bream early but the lake had switched off at 10.00am. 10.00am!!! I didn’t crawl out of bed until 11.00am. I’m not interested in Bream that only want to feed while I’m asleep.

The main purpose of the visit was to have been an experiment to see whether I could get to or close to the island from a railway bank peg. i.e. a chuck of maybe 90m. So I’d packed my big bullet and distance cage feeders, and brought along my measuring sticks so that when I splashed down 1m short of the island I could quote actual distances rather than the usual exaggerations. Fine. Of course, the one thing I hadn’t brought was the bloody rod!! The 3-section rod in the ready bag was actually a float rod. What sort of moron can’t differentiate between a 13′ Carbonactive and a 13′ Browning Heavy Feeder rod. Don’t answer that, I already know.

The objective was shot anyway because there was no way I could fish peg 10 and try out a 90m chuck down the lake, it would have caused carnage. So I set up to have a rather half-hearted attempt at catching Bream on a normal cage feeder at 35 turns, fishing 4 or 5 dead reds on a size 12. This proved to be surprisingly successful at catching Roach, which was a useful distraction for about 20 minutes but extremely tedious after an hour. So I decided to take advantage of my tackle faux pas and actually set up and fish a waggler. Thinking ahead to the KSD on Sunday I was reminded that I’d been pushed into fishing a waggler there last year and the expression ‘pig with a flick-knife’ sprung to mind. It had taken me a good 20 minutes to get to grips with the fundamentals of what had been my only angling method in my formative years. So, 2.5AAA crystal wag, size 18 B511 to 0.08, 2 x No.9s down the line, loose fed hemp and caster, caster hookbait.

This produced 100+ small Roach, biggest maybe 6oz and with a few small Hybrids mixed in, and was probably 2 hours well spent as it dusted some of the cobwebs off. I then spent the final 30 minutes back on the tip, where I was once again amazed by my ability to hook stamp Roach on a bunch of dead reds and my total inability to hook anything more Bream-like. I’ll be back, Hendre definitely owes me a decent net of Bream. It’s still a bit busy there at the moment, apparantly they’ve stopped issuing season permits, so I may have to wait until later on in the year to get a decent session in.

Evesham – midweek qualifier

Welsh Covid-19 lockdown eventually lifted on the Monday, leaving me clear to fish the midweeker on the Avon at Evesham instead of those crappy matches on the Afan and the other Afan.

To my horror C7 was already gone so I opted for A7, which turned out to be peg 75. Best peg in probably the worst or second worst section, but I was there and I was going to have a go (I had actually considered the possibility of double drawing, i.e. not bothering with a real no-hoper at Evesham and travelling down to Staverton instead – and probably drawing another no-hoper!!!).

The plus with 75 is that it’s shallow. In actual fact it isn’t, it’s 9′ deep, but when the pegs just above are 14′ deep then yes, it is (relatively) shallow. I worked out that the last time I had drawn it would have been 1984 or 1985. On that occasion I had caught 7 Chub and a big Roach, all on maggot, and all on the pole. The latter point did raise some bankside interest because this was back in the very early days of long poles and their use on a river was fairly rare. One thing I knew for certain was that I wasn’t going to repeat that trick.

I set up to fish maggot inside and maggot or worm long, 2g and 3g flatfloats respectively, a small blockend feeder for across to the tree, a 1.5g bodied rig to fish breadpunch, and 2 hemp rigs, a 4×16 and a 4×10. The flattie rigs were set up long on a Top 4 but the other rigs were set up on a Top 5. At the all-in I dropped maggots inside down the drop off and rolled two balls of punch crumb in at 11m. dropped inside with the maggot, instant bite, small Roach. Hooray, here we go! Dropped in again, small Perch, next drop-in I pulled out of a small Perch. Next drop-in……nothing……not a touch. 5 matches now and the nailed on gold-plated banker method for a couple of pound of Perch has blown out completely!

At least I now knew better than to hope that the line would pick up so I was fairly early onto the bread line. Usual quick response which was much needed after another maggot line disaster. Two small Roach followed by 3 small Pommies and then a couple more Roach but it was already starting to blow. I slipped a hemp on and nailed a small Roach so at least I knew that could be my next move, so I tried a golfball sized top-up and it didn’t really happen.

So I was 90 minutes in and had already caught a Roach on hemp on my bread rig. I actually managed a second Roach on this but it didn’t look like it was going to be a day when the Evesham Roach had decided to be that easy, so it was onto the heavier styl rig. The rest of the match can best be summarised as busy, pinging hemp, lots of changing depths and switching rigs. odd runs of bites and fish, some spells when I was getting issues with little shitters, and a couple of spells when I just wasn’t getting bites at all. I even had a comedy interlude involving a Daiwa topkit which are notorious for coming loose at the most inopportune moments, in this case 20 minutes before the end when it was pissing down and I had a small Roach on trying gamely to drag my topkit back out into the river. I managed to snag the rig with another top 5 and recover the hemp rig and fish intact. What larks eh!! And somehow I manage to catch probably 3.5 Lbs of hemp Roach all told.

When the all-out sounded and I walked up to the path I was all on my lonesome. Jim had packed up on 74, the anglers further down my section were well advanced in packing up and were soon on their way. Anthony Illiaf was a bit slower and stopped to ask me how I’d got on. 4 Lbs I said. Oh, Alex Clements on 81 is admitting to 4 Lbs too…….Bugger, because I thought I was just scraping 4Lbs and if Alex was owning up to 4 Lbs then he was obviously going to drop 5 on the scales. But I had to wait because I couldn’t be certain. Jenny and Jay eventually arrived after their long trek down and when I dropped 4-4-0 on the scales Jenny immediately said that I might qualify. Qualify?? TBH as I’d originally been booked into Llandeg for the BH weekend, then cancelled that to put my name down for a Burton Joyce Festival (since cancelled!) I’d totally forgotten that I was fishing a Qualifier. But, I was expecting Alex to do me for the section, and peg 87 to do me for the qualifier slot, so I dumped my nets in the car and headed back home. I definitely didn’t fancy getting involved in the melee of anglers looking at the results going up.

So, nice surprise when I eventually got to see a picture of the board, Alex had 3-12-0 (still a good weight from there!) and 87 had blown out, so the section and a qualifier ticket. Simply lovely.

Lockdown – Day 103

And back again to the first River Afan. Peg 8………now then faithful reader, the issue with peg 8 is that it is always included in the first section, which means it is in with 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7 in a 6-peg section. Historically what would then happen is that peg1 and/or peg 2 would bag up and frame, in which case peg 6 or 7 would pick up the section by default. Or if pegs 1 and 2 blow out, which does seem to be more the case recently, then peg 7 wins the section, or if it frames then peg 5 or 6 pick up the default payment. The more astute of you will have noticed that I haven’t actually mentioned peg 8, which is of somewhat inferior quality, or, as Shep put it before the all-in, is shit.

So, decent section, shit peg, happy days. The forecast was for a strong breeze with some blustery interludes, so I binned off anything which looked like long on the pole and settled for a 2g maggot and a 3g worm flattie rig to fish at 9m, which was doable. And I also set up a small blockend feeder and finally a 3AAA waggler which was probably just a little ambitious in the conditions.

I kicked off by bait droppering maggot on the pole line and going in with the maggot rig. Nothing much at first but then a small Perch (my first in 4 outings) and then an Eel, and I started to get a run of bites which were either hittable, in which case they were small Roach, or totally unmissable, in which case they were from Eels. I did connect with a second Eel, probably about 8oz, and did all the hard work to get it to the top only for it to bite me off about a foot short of the net. Oh Dear!! I then missed a few unmissables before I hooked another Eel which I bullied to the top but which then surprising decided to run off towards Shep on peg 9. When it came to the top it was a serious Perch, all mouth and bad attitude, so I was thankful that I’d gone in quite heavy line wise. I netted that, dropped in, and almost instantly had an action replay. Another proper ‘William’, possibly just a bit smaller than the first.

Not surprisingly that was it for now on the pole line, so I droppered some more maggot and had a look on the tip (useless, not a bite all day) and the wag (one Bleak, one small Roach) I came back inside to see if anything had settled but no was the answer, so I chopped some dendra and stuck two dropperfuls of that in. Another look on the tip (refer to above comment), came inside on the Lobbie, nothing, half dendra got me a small Perch but nothing else. All further looks on the pole line were fruitless although I did give it a few tries, especially in the last hour, in case some Eels had returned.

The wind now seemed a little less blustery and moreoff my right shoulder so I had a spell on the wag. I managed to get the float to run well down the peg and it disappeared, Chub about a pound. Shep had just about checked with me that it was a Chub when I caught its friend next run down. possibly slightly bigger.

And that was that really, I did have a lightening fast bite on the wag with a about 20 mins to go but I was feeding so I snatched at it and felt a bump but that was it. Perhaps on another day I wouldn’t have even seen the bite but would have spotted the line tightening up and responded more gently. Perhaps on another day I wouldn’t have seen the bite full stop. Who knows?

So my day was defined by the two instances where I had quality fish back to back, and those four fish would have accounted for probably 4.5Lbs of my 5-9-0 total. And basically as predicted peg 6 took the section with 7-13-0 and peg 7 had 5-10-0 (yes, ouch!!). I was more pleased with the weight I took off the peg than the peg itself, which is, in all fairness, pretty shit.

Never mind, Welsh Covid-19 travel restrictions are lifted on Monday, so I can go and fish Evesham if I like……………

PS Losing a better fish at Evesham is usually costly and today was no exception, with Andy framing off peg 6 and the 5-10-0 taking the default And perhaps better not to even think about the bumped Chub.

Lockdown Day 100

Wednesday so back to the first River Afan as the weather was a bit more temperate. Something odd happened at the draw as I went for C7 which we all know is peg 33 but for some reason on the day it was peg 15. I wasn’t too unhappy about that but the section above Jubilee Bridge has been fairly rancid this year so I wasn’t expecting too much.

The game plan was:-

1) clean out the Perch inside, 1.5g rig over bait-droppered maggot

2) fish breadpunch at 9m under a 1.5g float

3) fish across, small blockend feeder and maggot and

4) fish 13m lobbie/dendra under a 5g Cralusso Shark or a 3g Colmic flattie.

As I am writing this I am thinking what an excellent plan it was. A few slight problems though, as for the third match now this season I totally failed to attract a single Perch short over bait-droppered maggot. The 9m bread line did work a bit, I think I took eight small Roach but then managed to catch one on hemp which was probably my downfall, because although I’d caught on hemp at the 2 hour mark I only caught maybe a dozen hemp Roach during the rest of the match, and they were small anyway so I ended up with 2-2-0. But every time I’d convinced myself that I had to switch to a worm line I seemed to get a bite and or a fish, and in my mind I was only chasing a few pounds to nick the section. In reality that was some way off and Tony Davis showed me the way home form the peg below. Two Perch inside for 6oz, 2Lbs of Roach on the punch in two spells, four 12oz Eels on the maggot feeder and a pound or so of Perch as well. 6-9-0 for 5th overall, thank you very much.

So I’d basically set myself the wrong target and as a result fished the wrong match. On a positive note the breadpunch worked OK and I actually managed to catch some Roach (admittedly very small Roach) on the hemp, which I haven’t managed to do for probably 35 years. Must try harder!!