Sun 25th Jan - Woodlands Open

Well with last weekend being terrible regarding weather conditions I must say I didn’t really fancy it. So when this weekend came around I was eager to get back on the bank even though the weather once again looked a little suspect. Although this week I finally had my new jacket after waiting for a few weeks to swap it so hopefully I’d stay nice and dry.

I arrived up at Woodlands a bit later than normal, probably 8:45 and so quickly paid on and bought my bait. There were about 40 booked on by 9 o clock and so four lakes were put in. Curlew was a 6 peg section, Kestrel was another 6 peg section and Skylark and Partridge had a section per bank.

I managed to draw Kestrel 28, in fairness I didn’t know if this was a good or bad draw but I was soon told it was a crap draw! Apparently the lake was won the day before with 10lb+ of silvers. So I was essentially fighting for my section and with this in mind I thought I’d try the first half hour on bomb and corn and see how it went then fish for silvers for the middle four hours and depending on how it was going I’d swap to the bomb again for the last half hour.

I got round to my peg and the 6 of us on the 38 peg lake obviously had plenty of room. I had Mark Longhurst from the shop to my left on 25, someone else on 31 and three others opposite including Rab.

The lake was flat calm and there was only a slight wisp of wind that would occasionally drift through.

I already had the bomb set up so cracked on with setting up the pole. I set up two identical rigs to fish at 11m, the only reason I set two up was in case I hooked a big un and got broke, it would just speed things up a bit. I was using a 4x14 carbon stem, very fine tip bristle Milo float on 0.12 Ultima Power Match to a hooklength of 0.10 Powerline and a Middy 63:13 size 20. Elastic was size 8 Maver Latex.

At the call of time I shipped out to my 11m line which was at 1 o’ clock and tipped in a dozen maggots and a couple of pieces of corn. I then baited up with corn and cast the bomb out. I was only giving it five minutes before recasting in the hope I could cast onto a carps head! The first hour went by without even a liner and this was typical for everyone. Mark to my left went on the pole line a few minutes before me and was getting silvers, one a chuck and had also had a carp of about 4lb. I thought it was definitely time to drop in on the pole line, first drop in and I was rewarded with a small roach, this carried on for the remaining four hours, and I managed to put maybe 60 fish in the keepnet over this time, so by no means frantic but I was still happy continually putting fish in the net, be it a skimmer, roach, gudgeon or even a rudd!

With about 45 minutes to go Rab had a carp on the bomb, then the bloke opposite me had one, with not wanting all my hard work silver bashing to be undone I baited up the bomb rod again and cast out to the middle. I had a couple of pulls before the tip flew round and I was soon rewarded with a carp, although be it only about 2lb it was still a boost. I recast and had continuous liners until the final hooter sounded and the match was brought to a close.

It was to be close and come the weigh in Rab was leading with a low 11lb, Mark put 11lb 8oz on the scales and then it was my turn, I’d managed 9lb 13oz of which at least 7.5lb was made up of silvers so I just needed a slightly bigger carp! The bloke to my right managed 7lb 10oz of silvers and had also been kept relatively busy but missed out on the weight boosting single carp.

Back to the car park and Gordon had managed to win his section and the match overall was won with 71lb off Skylark I think where as the back up weights were all around 25/26lb and all came from Curlew.

All in all I’d had a nice day, the weather almost spoilt things in the middle of the match but it didn’t last and I’d managed to come somewhere near on a venue I don’t have too much experience in although I did learn a few lessons throughout the match.

1. I should have possibly tried to fish closer in, i.e. six metres instead of 11 would have perhaps seen me put a few more in the net.
2. Maybe even risk fishing the full five hours for this duration, if I had say 8lb in four hours, that’s 10lb in five hours, teamed with fishing short could well push for a winning weight.

We’ll just have to wait and see though!