The highs and lows of match fishing

Well you could say my last few weeks fishing have been somewhat of a roller coaster, infact somewhat of an expensive ride

Theale Pits

Today was my weekly Wednesday jaunt to Theale Pits, the Sunday prior to this we had a knock up here and even though it had fished hard, I won the knock up with 78lb, all caught shallow on peg 12 fishing pellet up in the water.

Come the draw, I drew 10th away in the rover, with the weather quite sunny and lots of fish cruising round I was secretly hoping to get peg 12 again. Unbelievably I did get peg 12 and hopefully a good match fishing shallow was to follow. This is where the wheels fell of the wagon, after 1/2 an hour in the match I was flying, I had 7 fish in the net. Then disaster struck, when slapping the water with the pole rig, I managed to hook the overhanging tree, trying to ship back to pull for a break resulted in the top 5 coming adrift from the pole. I was cursing so I grabbed the spare 4 and 5 I had and shipped back out to try pull it back, the rig come free but the top 5 sank like a brick. This was the end of the match for me, I went into the lake to try and find it but my search was fruitless, a diver went in the next day for me and still couldn’t find it, so I had lost about £400 worth of pole.

Rolfs

Today I was off to Rolfs to fish a match I had booked through one of the fishing forums. I was still miffed about loosing my top five but hopefully today would go  somewhat to easing the pain. Come the draw I was hoping for peg 6, this was the form peg, my heart skipped a beat when I pulled peg 9 out and I thought it was 6 as I was looking at it upside down but peg 9 was still a peg I thought I could do ok from.

Rig wise I set up 4 rigs, 2 to fish shallow, one to fish banded pellet at 5 metres and a line to fish against the huge bush in my right hand margin. Baitwise I had 12 pints of pellet, bit of punched meat and a tin of corn. Come the all in it was 2 large pots of pellet on my margin line and 5 metre line and I started pinging pellets at 14.5 metres to fish shallow. Paul on peg 32 which is on the opposite bank but actually quite close to peg 9 was into a fish before I had finished cupping bait in, infact it was black in front of him. Bites were slow to start with but I increased my feed rate to try and draw some of the fish that were sat in front of Paul. This seamed to do the trick as over the next hour I had 12 fish for 80lb. Bites stopped but I knew I had my margin and 5 metre line to fall back on. On the 5 metre line I foul hooked one and hooked another one properly which I both lost. No other bites were forthcoming on this line and very frustratingly I only caught 2 small carp in the edge. This was my match, I finished with 14 fish for 92lb, this was good enough for second in section and the £46 went some way to easing the pain  of loosing my pole sections on Wednesday.

Theale Pits

Come Sunday we were having another knock up and with only 7 of us fishing we’d all have a bit of space. As we are all members of Cove so we don’t have to pay any peg fees, the pools were set at £10 a man with a £10 super pool. I opted out of the super pool as I wanted to try a few things mainly fishing the method.

I had the last ball in the hat, this was perhaps a lucky omen as I was first away so I opted for peg 43 which is a good method peg and also I had loads of room. Obviously I set the method up, but also 2 margin line left and right of me and a line at 5 metres. For the method I had 7kg of method mix, the anglers who do well here still fish method balls the size of cricket balls so this was my plan and for the margin line I had 3 pints of corn, some pellet and paste.

To cut a long story short, I got the tip to go round, infact quite a few times, and I recorded a weight of 132lb all caught on the method mainly on hair rigged banded pellet with second place having 97lb caught on meat fished shallow.