The Oaks - Cedar, 30/10/11

This would be our last scheduled Club match of the year and after two pickups on my last two matches I was eager to finish the season on a high.

With the weather cooling off a bit (although it’s still surprisingly mild for this time of year), I wasn’t sure how effective pellet would be as my bait today and so decided to have a day on the maggot to try and keep bites coming all day, something I repeatedly fail to do when fishing pellet on Cedar.

There were 23 of us on today which is a fantastic turnout in comparison to the previous couple of weeks. We ended up with pegs 6 to 42 so we could peg it two in miss one to give everyone a little bit of room. At the draw there were two pegs left, in here were 8 and 27, 8 would be an end peg in our match and 27 is on a corner, 27 looks a good peg but I know Owen fished it in the Northern Intersite match a couple of years back and didn’t have too good a day. So as you can imagine I drew 27 and Stu “The end peg kid” got peg 8.

I arrived at my peg and had Butch on 26, Bri Gascoigne on 29, Jonesy on 30 and Woody on 32. This peg is quite good for keeping an eye on everyone else as you look down the whole of the back straight.

After messing about riddling my maggots off I could finally get my rigs ready. Perhaps something I need to invest in for next season is a large maggot riddle, doing 4 pints of maggots through a bait tub riddle takes an eternity! I set up 4 rigs in total, two rigs were for fishing maggot, which were Malman Cedars in 4x10 and 4x12 both on 0.12 mainline with an 0.10 hooklength to a size 18 Middy 63:13. These were finished off with size doubled up 5 elastic on the 4x12 and an 8 on the 4x10. The 4x10 rig would be for seeking out anything and everything during the match with a strung bulk where as the 4x12 rig had a bulk of shot just above the hooklength as a more positive rig. I set up a 0.4g BGT shallow long float for the margin at 11m where I had a rather woeful looking autumnal bush. This was on 0.14 mainline to an 0.12 hooklength and size 18 Gamakatsu pellet and paste hook. Elastic was size 12 latex. My final rig was a shallow rig for fishing open water to my right.

The match got underway and I shipped out with a big pot of maggots onto the sedge line and then went straight over the top with the 4x12 rig and double maggot hook bait. Usually when introducing this amount of bait it can take 20 minutes or so for the fish to settle and start feeding properly, today however I was getting bites from the off, but from nuisance roach and gudgeon. I persevered with this line for an hour before dumping another big pot and having a look down the side.

First put in down the edge and I was getting indications, I managed to hook my first fish down there, a small carp or about 12oz. A few more of these before it went quiet and I decided to big pot some pellets down there and give them an hour to find it.

Back out on the sedge line I managed a couple of better Ide before it slowed again. I figured out that it took a big pot to catch three decent Ide before you had to repeat to avoid catching the small fish. At this rate I’d need a gallon to put any sort of weight together, Jonesy offered me his left over maggots to bulk out my quantity of bait but I felt I was too far behind him and Woody to catch up so didn’t bother.

I ended up switching between the two line catching the odd fish but wasn’t putting any real runs of fish together and never any of a decent size.

Time was called and I’d enjoyed it though there were just too many small fish, and after talking to a few of the regulars afterwards I perhaps shouldn’t have fished maggot!

The scales came round and for the second week on the trot I’d weighed 25lb12oz. Jonesy and Woody both weighed in 35lb ish, perhaps I should have pinched those maggots after all!!

Super Stu won the match again, making it 11 this year with 60 odd pound from in form peg 8.