Round three of the Summer League was at Gold Valley which most people will know is one of the top match waters in the South East. With the match in mind I managed to get in on the Garbolino match on the Friday for a bit of a practice session. I wont bore you with the details but it fished rubbish and I was soon on the phone on the way home telling people to order casters and worms and to be prepared to fish for silvers as the carp were definitely in love mode and not many were having a munch. For those of you who haven’t fished Gold valley it is stuffed with silver fish. Roach over a pond are common and there are loads of skimmers to be had.
For the match the plan was to fish for an hour and a half for the carp and if they weren’t showing to get your head down on the silvers till the last hour and then try and snaffle a few carp late on. With this in mind I had 8mm pellets, caster, maggot and worm.
In the car park we sorted out the draw cards with two teams of five competing and I got Barry Upperton to draw for our Trabucco S.E. Red team as recently I haven’t been able to draw for toffee. Sure enough Barry came out and said to me your on peg 42 on Syndicate. The pegs have been renumbered so it didn’t mean much to me until I realized I was on the old peg 100 in the corner. Happy days or so I thought. I got to the peg and stood looking at it. The carp were swirling and topping. It was solid. Team mate Perry Stone came past and we had a quick chat and after that I decided to set up pellet waggler for short and long, a bomb for pellet, and a pole for down the edge. Simple was going to be best I thought.
At the whistle I cast the pellet waggler straight out. I think if theres one hanging around you’ll catch it and you don’t need to feed and you don’t need to mess around with potting gear in. For the sake of 10 minutes you can have 20 chucks and maybe snaffle a few. Sure enough third chuck I hooker a proper one and after a bit of a scrap I netted a fish around 8lb. Lovely old job. Four of them an hour and I’ll have 150lb. I had another one shortly after, a bit smaller but the wag was working nicely but them it started to get a bit harder and I was struggling for bites. After 2 hours I had 5 fish and had two do me in the trees along the bank. The peg is roped off and you have about 20 yards from bank to rope so you do have to bully them a bit and get them moving towards you but some you just can’t stop going into the bank. I couldn’t really see what was happening to my right but Shaun Clifford next door from Delcac had two and a couple of skimmers and then I knew it was close between me and a couple of other along the bank as I had Peter Upperton behind me on Bungalow lake who could see what was happening.
The carp were definitely not in the mood and I resorted to chucking a 6SSG pellet wag all over the peg and managed to hook another four on the splash. The carp definitely didn’t want to settle where the feed was going in so chucking the wag about was for me the best option. Shaun next door had a few more and I finished with 9 carp. At the weigh in I had 49lb for 5th in section out of 15 which was not too bad.
After the match if I were to say I did anything wrong it was I fed the wrong pellets. I should have used 6mm and swapped between a 6mm and 8mm on the hook. That said hindsight is the greatest angler I know. Ian Dixon( Delcac) on Bungalow Lake fished 6mm and had 156lb to win the match with Robbie Taylor (Delcac) second with 105lb.
Team wise our Trabucco S.E. Blue finished fourth on the day with 51 points with Delcac winning the day with 62 points.
Next Sunday is the 4th round of the Passies League so although I won’t be fishing it I’ll keep you posted. I think I’ll be at Colemans Cottage on Saturday getting in some practice for the forthcoming Drennan Super League and then Sunday is a practice match for round 5 of the Summer league at Monks Lakes.
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Tom
