Duane Memorial Match, Lindholme. 21-10-2006

Spending most of the night up with the new born put paid to any form of mental preparation I might have wanted to do for this match. A 200+ turnout meant this was the biggest match I’d fished for a long time, probably since I was about 18.

Luckily due to the numbers there was a rolling draw allowing me to have a lie in and still turn up in good time and draw peg 70 on Bonsai, a decent peg from what I was told. I managed to grab a buttie and buy some raffle tickets all ready in time for the minutes silence at 10.

After finding out where my peg was it was time to get myself tackled up. My peg was at the corner of a point with an island (just) to my right and one a feeder throw away to my right. The wind was coming from the left, not too strong as I was setting up but would get a lot worse as the day wore on. I’d got Cleggy two pegs to my left with a spare peg in between, although the pegs are that close together you would hardly notice (sorry Neil).
A few or the regulars had informed me that fish were still to be caught up in the water, with that in mind and the fact I’d had an awful nights sleep I decided to make it my main line of attack but with an on the deck rig at 7 metres to the right available as a backup.

At the all in I potted in some pellets from a height at the 11 metres I’d decided to fish out into the main water and began firing approx 10 pellets every 40 seconds or so. I wanted to feed more pellets less frequently to slowly come up in the water following the feed that I’d initially put in and also to stop them coming too high in the water. I tend to use skinz as hookbait when fishing up in the water as they’re more robust especially when there’s a few smaller fish around. I tend to dye some red as a change of hookbait colour. The first fish came to the net after about 5 minutes, a nice size F1 probably just over a 1lb. I caught steadily until the wind picked up from the side and made it nigh on impossible to feed and hold the pole at the same time. Cleggy was also suffering from this and I noticed he’d switched to a rig about 5 meters fishing caster I think.
I fed a pot of pellets on the 6 metre line while I persevered to give the pellets time to settle. First put in the float dipped and a small F1 came to the net. The fish closer in on this line were noticeably smaller that those I caught further out shallow.
The smaller fish coming off this line meant that not a great deal of weight was being put in the net but at least I was catching. If the wind hadn’t picked up I think the shallow line would have produced, especially as the stamp of fish was better.

I ended up with 25lb odd which was good enough to get me the section by default, one of the regulars picked up 3rd place overall from a few pegs down.

Well done to Si and Juzzy for organising the match, and to Neil for allowing us to use the venue and to put his own cash up for the prize fund.
As a bonus I managed to win a raffle prize of some elastics, hooks and bits and bobs.