Blinkered approach

Well today I was off to Rolfs yet again to fish the Good Friday pole only open. It is premarily a practice match for the anglers fishing the festival there over the weekend and despite dropping several suttle hints I didn’t get my leave pass stamped to have yet another near week fishing again, so I had to make do with just the one days fishing here.

The fish seam to be moving around alot here at the moment so you are never sure where the winner is going to come from. I quietly fancied peg 13 but to be honest I fancied anywhere on the large lake. I pulled out peg 26 in the large lake, this peg won the teams of 3 on Sunday so I was quietly pleased with this. The peg is about 9ft deep and I set up four rigs,  3 of these were to fish my line at 14.5 metres, one on the deck, one at mid depth and one at about 2ft deep. The other rig I planned to fish against the bush to my left in the water at about 4 metres. Baitwise I had my usual Rolf menu, tin of punched meat, tin of corn, 12 pints of 6mm pellet and some 6mm expanders.

On the all in I put a 250ml pot of pellet on the 14. 5 metre line and a the same again against the bush in the water. First put in fishing corn and we were in and I had a fish in the net whilst some people were still potting out. Back out again I kept pinging pellets over the top and foul hooked a fish  so this was my signal to come up in the water. First put in with my mid depth rig I lost another one, but this is part of the parcel at Rolfs as it some time takes a while for you to work it out with regards to the depth the fish are feeding at and how often and how much you feed.

The next two hours didn’t really go to plan, infact the red mist was starting to descend with me trashing rigs, getting broke on a fish and then retying a new rig to lose the rig and fish in the tree to my left. Eventually I started to catch but could only get two or three in sucession then they would disappear for half an hour. Most of the anglers round the lake seamed to be putting a few fish together.

I wasn’t sure what I had come the all out, I had three fish on the board for 31lb and estimated I had 14 fish in my net so I reckoned I had in the region of about 100lb. At the weigh in I recorded 111lb enough to win the section and 4th overall and little over 30lb behind the winner. It had been a very close match with only 10 lb being between the 2nd and 6th placed angler. I couldn’t help but go away from this match critical of my performance, my main criticism was I should of took my blinkers of and rested the long pole line and tried to catch a fish elsewhere. I didn’t even fish the line at 4 metres which I had fed all match. Still you learn the hard way, and I will look forward putting into practice what I learnt today next Wednesday.