Lodge Farm, Field Pond. 10-09-2006

The penultimate match of our club league saw us visiting Lodge Farm again, only this time on Field pond. Our last encounter saw me drawn on a golden peg and winning the match until the last hour when Gav lent his rod to the guy on the next peg, who was also on a golden peg. Upshot was I get beat in the last hour by 2lbs to miss out on about £250.

The draw brought me peg 16, which apparently was a non starter but the fact I’d drawn a golden peg again was a good incentive to try and not make history repeat itself. As we arrived at the lake it became clear that due to the low numbers I was on an end peg, all the corners had been left out to make it a fairer match.

I set up 3 rigs initally for the match.

Plumping up at 13 metres found me about 5′ of water and down the edge at 3 metres I had approx 2′. My shallow rig was made up starting at about 2′.

At the all in I dumped a pot of soaked pellets at 13 metres and went straight over it with the shallow rig and a 4mm expander. Feeding approx six 4mm hard feed pellets every 30 seconds I was getting bites instantly but was losing the pellet. After rebaiting a few more times it became apparent that the pellets were getting hammered by the smaller fish as it was falling through the water.

For the first time I had bought some of the new Skinz hook pellets to try. It seemed like the prefect opportunity to try them out. I’d soaked and dyed them red the night before to soften them a little. As they were a little though I pulled out the point to reduce the risk of the point not emerging on strike. After a few more dips the float burried and the grey hydro was streaming out. A few minutes later an F1 of about 1lb was in the net.

This carried on for the couple of hours or so until bites dropped off. I came to try the short paste line whilst carrying feeding the long line up in the water. Two F1’s and a skimmer follwed off this line before the paste was getting hammered by the smaller fish.

I changed back over to the shallow rig and immediately started catching again but was getting more dips from the smaller fish. To make sure I wasn’t getting liners I set up a rig with a poly ball set at 6″ deep. The indiciation were still the same leaving me to believe they were in effect smaller fish attacking the bait.
I went back to the main shallow rig and carried on at a steady pace. With a couple of hours to go I decided to feed a few more pellets to try and get the fish feeding more aggressively, this seemed to work and I caught pretty much non stop till the end of the match.

The scales registered 53lb 13oz for 1st place and the golden peg that eluded me on our last visit.. The owner commented that I’d fished well to win from that peg as our end of the lake rarely produces any weights.

The section point puts me on 7 overall for the league. The leader at the moment is on 5 so I need a good result on the last match at Lakeside in October.