30th January - Friday Match at Gold Valley

The Hopeful Match Fisher

So off today to Gold Valley after a two week lay-off.  I would have gone for the Saturday match but it's on Syndicate Lake, which has been very peggy of late.  Some of the anglers are avoiding it and I'm one of them.

Anyway today's was on Gold Lake pegs 40s-50s.  The wind was quite blustery from NW and at tides downright cold.  The sun was in and out too.  The main thing to mention about weather is that there was a 'dumping' of hail and snow on Thursday and that cold water has made the fish a bit frigid.

I've generally done well on Gold Lake in recent times, so I was confident to use methods and baits as before.  Last time I fished I was second in section from peg 37, all corn with lead.  This time I was on peg 49, known to be a winnable peg from previous matches.  I took a rather simple approach which was to setup two identical lead rigs and then tune the rigs as the match progressed.  

It must be said that few matches are won without carp on Gold, and I honestly didn't see the point of fishing explicitly for a bag of skimmers.  I knew I might pick a few up though, so kept my options open.  Peg 49 has a tree to the left and so casting care is required.  There is an island directly in front at about 50m although the centre rope cut right in front of it (as far as I can see).  I could have tried fishing right up on the island but I was a bit worried about catching on the rope, so fished off the island by about 10m.

Also I had the theory, although not proved, that the deeper part of the lake would be the warmest.  I'm expecting that the lakes is mainly below 4deg water temperature, so the deeper water would be better.  On that basis I also fished into the middle water as a second line.

The whistle I fished into the middle water and fed a little, but nothing was showing at all - not even liners.  I went on tour around the peg long and short and either side with the two adjacent pegs clear.  At around 90 minutes I had a decent whack from a carp around 3lb and followed half and hour later by a reasonable skimmer.  Towards end of the third hour I had another similar skimmer.

The guy in peg 51 had nothing, and after his walk up and down the bank the news was that there were a few skimmers but no carp.  I felt reasonably confident that I might be somewhere in the frame with three hours gone and about 7lb in the net.

I decided to try a pop-up over the the island and rigged-up accordingly.  A simple setup popped-up about 8 inches with a yellow Ringers Allsort.  Three minutes after the cast I got a tentative pull that looked like a liner but kept on nudging around.  I struck into nothing as I expected and reeled-in only to to find after a couple of couple turns there was a very good lump on!  In actual fact it came in fairly easily and I netted it to see a very good fish that later turned out to be 17lb!

I now felt as though I could be sure of the frame, and if I could net a couple more skimmers I might be guaranteed of it.  More or less the story of the rest of the match was of nothing at all, not a squeak.  I weighed in 25lb 2oz for a section win and second overall.  Remember what I said about the bream?  A guy at the far end had 10 bream for 30lb on dead maggots and micros.  That is the first time I've known a Gold Valley match won with silvers over carp.

Maybe next time I'll rig a bit better for a bream option :)

Hopeful