My First Match for Ages

The Hopeful Match Fisher

I finally got around to getting my first match booked up (well at least the first for about 20 years anyway).  What allowed that was that I got my keepnet setup sorted out and found a free Saturday.

Willow Park is well known to southern anglers and it's one of the old commercial fisheries, which many would describe as a natural venue (at least to look at).  The Saturday open matches seem to alternate between the small lake and middle lake.  The small lake is considered to be better for weight than the middle lake and it's float only.  I'm grateful to Willow Park for putting some details about match results, pegs and winning methods on their website.  I mined the info to see what intelligence I could get about it.

The small lake at Willow Park is well lined with trees and willows in some of the corners.  It was one of these corners that I drew from the bag, peg 1 in fact.  A couple of the regulars were quick to point out that it was a fruitful peg but would be hard to get the lumps out of the jungle.  So it was to prove. 

The layout of the corner was such that I had a lot of my own water.  I therefore opted to fish a longish pole (10m) out away from the corner where I potted in feed on 10o'clock, 12o'clock and 2 o'clock lines.  I also regularly pinged a few pellets out to see what interest there might be up in the water.  

First drop in on banded pellet hooked into a lump which charged out into the lake, which i was happy about (away from the roots), but then made for the jungle as I drew it in.  Lost.  There was evidence of a lot of fish rooting around on the feed, so I was confident I could get something moving.  Looking around lake I couldn't see an awful lot happening so I was pleased to have some obvious activity.

Over the first hour I worked out a succession of skimmers and hooked into the odd carp - all with the same effect: lost fish.  Hours two and three were very quiet and I reverted to silvers on corn to try build some weight.  Around three hours I managed to get mirror of 5lb into the net, but now the problem was connecting with any carp at all, let alone getting them to the net.  With around ninety minutes to go I fed both margins and the lumps moved in with a vengeance.  Much to my frustration I lost all but one up until the hooter.  I weighed in 11 pounds although I not sure why I bothered.

I recon I managed to get more carp on the end of my piece of string than most of the other anglers, but the peg and my approach just didn't allow me to get the buggers landed.  I've fished pegs like this before and done better, but I concluded that my gear was not up to the job.  My margin rig was a latex 16 elastic with 0.21 to 0.17 bottom.  Most of the losses were bottomed-out hookpulls rather than breakages.

Anyway I enjoyed the experience and went away with some clear ideas about what to do next.  A practice session a couple of days back saw me with purple hydro, 0.21s bottom and PR38s.  I did a fair bit better.

Next match is on 27th September.

Hopeful