Time is just passing me by at the moment; I have just not found enough of the precious commodity to
Back With A Bang!
Well, its been a while since my last blog but I have been so busy with work and Xmas etc that I’ve not had the chance to catch up. Over the Xmas period I actually had a break from fishing for a few weeks just to recharge my batteries, and I must admit the prospect of going and breaking the ice didn’t inspire me much!!!!! Anyway it gave me a really good chance to get all my gear ready for the next couple of months and
I’ve been on a tackle prep marathon!!!!! And I must admit come last weekend and I was buzzing to get fishing again.
Anyway my first match of 2009 was to be on the Thorne pairs/Fred Kaye memorial series on the stain forth and keadby canal. I fished it last year with angling legend Gary Jubb and we came a very creditable second over the six match series, but unfortunately it clashed with another league he was fishing this year. So when Lee Kerry asked if I wanted to fish with him I jumped at the chance! The only problem we would face for the first round was getting some joker! As It was the first weekend after the new year nobody had been overseas to import any and I thought we would be joker less on the first round, but luckily lee had managed to source some from Manchester way, so with joker sorted I couldn’t wait for the weekend to arrive.
After the cold snap we have been having I expected it to be rock hard and as I arrived at the draw early I decided to go down to the canal and wasn’t exactly shocked to see it frozen solid! But it was bloodworm fishing and that always throws up surprises but in all honesty I expected a grueller. Anyway I drew for us and I pulled peg 135 at the new inn length and lee at 259 at Dunstan’s in Thorne. My draw was OK but the pegs to my left should beat my peg every time. And lee’s peg was OK and he was pleased with it as he won his section off it in the winter league a month or so back.
When I got to my peg with an age to set up I had a good chance to have a think about it I decided to fish for perch at 6m and 11m and fish for roach at 14m and 16.5m, I set 3 rigs up a 0.4gr Sensas lomme on 0.10 mainline with a bulk of number 9’s with 3 no.11 droppers and a 6 inch hook length of 0.06 to a 22 Drennan fine match hook, a 0.6gr rig with everything the same except number 10 droppers and because I expected it to be hard I set up a wire bristled float to really scratch about with a fine 24 hook on too. Now for perching I think its essential to use wire bristles as ive watched perch in clear water and they are really hard to catch at times and definitely reject a bait if the float is too buoyant.
I also like to colour my shots in black as its amazing how often perch ignore your hook bait to chase your shots around!!!!!! I decided to feed leam at 6m as I do like a little bit of a cloud just to try and give the fish a bit of confidence in the gin clear water, I then fed some molehill soil at 11m. But on my furthest swims I fed positively and used ground bait on my 14m line. This mix was dynamite baits silver x roach, silver x canal and lake black and a bit of brown crumb. I ran the whole mix twice through a flour sieve so that there wasn’t any large particles that would float off the balls and take the fish with them!!!!
This was mixed quite sticky and then I riddled a couple of handfulls of a leam and soil mix into it. My longest line was to be fed with some raw joker. At the all in I fed 4 balls of leam with 75ml of joker in at 6m, 3 balls of soil with 100ml in at 11m, 6 balls of ground bait with 250ml of joker in at 14m and 2 balls of raw at 16.5m. I kicked of short and caught a few perch and surprisingly a few roach, now given the fact there was ice on the canal I didn’t expect to catch any roach so early, so was already wishing id been a bit more positive on my shorter lines. I decided to put a couple of balls in at 6m to try and keep the roach there. Anyway by swapping between my 6 and 14m swims I was catching roach really nicely and after 2 hours was definitely winning the section, then I noticed the lad to my right catch a decent roach short, followed by one of around a pound which I must say was a lovely fish!!!!
He was catching really well to hand of all things and he later told me he put a decent amount of bait there at the start, which in hindsight with the roach on the munch was the right thing to do.
Anyway I tried to keep up on my long pole swims but they where just too slow to keep up with him and a pike in my swim definitely didn’t help things, it seemed like I would catch half a dozen roach then id have to change something or change swims, and when your trying to keep up with someone catching on a top 4 to hand its not an ideal situation to be in!!!!! anyway come the end of the match and I knew he had battered me, and it turned out he had won the match with 13lb!!!!! Fair play, I ended up with 10lb odd which was a lovely days fishing to be fair and a lot more than I was expecting and this was good enough for 3rd in the section and 4th in the match.
When I got back to match HQ lee had done the business and won the section with 4lb 10oz, the ice was much worse on there section and they had to break it. So with 4 points we won the day and picked up 120 quid for our efforts which was a nice start to the series and the year.
Anyway next week my preparation for the forthcoming winter league semi at Lindholme is starting with a teams of 3 league and my team is myself, Alan Scotthorne and Lee Kerry so hopefully we will get the draws to do the business. I am really looking forward to the next few months at Lindholme as all the teams will be practicing and there will be some big matches. As well as Barnsley I really fancy the lads from Cleveland angling centre to do well, they have some awesome young lads fishing for them with my good mates Ash Clements and James Dent as prime examples so watch this space cos I’m sure they will push us!!!!
