Friday 27 March 2015

Thursday 26/03/2015 - Bathampton AA Over 55's and Disabled - Bridge Pool

Continuing on from Dave Gillard’s close encounter with a Heron during last weeks Silvers league. Dave Bacon decided to help Dave out by giving him a Risk Assessment tool - a Bird Book (pictured right).

Today was the start of the 2015 Coffin Dodgers bringing with it two more new members – pictured lower right – Tony Rixon and Paul Barnfield - heavy weights in many ways!

It appears that most, if not all the matches this year will be limited to Bridge Pool, a disappointment for me as it does make a change to fish other venues. Withy Pool has been providing some excellent Silvers catches for some of the Coffin Dodgers who have been up there pleasure fishing. We put this down to the influx of Carp from Bridge Pool providing more competitions for the feed. Let’s hope the reverse isn’t true for Bridge Pool. This summer will tell.

Thirty two fishing today so only pegs 20 and 12 not pegged. In to the draw bag and out comes peg 7 – OK but has lost form of late. For company I had Andy Smith on peg 8 and Chris Rolfe on peg 6.

I had a family commitment today so I had planned to fish until the end leaving my keepnets behind for Alan Jones to bring home. However, I had a call from the Special One explaining that I had to get home sooner which meant packing up 45 minutes earlier. So I decided not to target Carp relying on accidentals. So I set up the Ronnie rig for caster over caster. I didn’t have a bite on this - the Ronnie’s are conspicuous by their absence. So this rig was packed away early. So I was left to rely on two rigs both 4x16 Jolly’s, one for softened pellet and the other maggot. I picked up a nice tow from left to right against the wind – lovely.

Andy Smith started with his usual aerial bombardment of his “Millionaires GB”. I started at 8 metres with 4mm pellet over micro. The swim was immediately alive with tiny Skimmers more coming off than finding the keepnet. So as an experiment I started to feed hard 4’s and had two decent Skimmers for about 5lb. I thought I had it sorted. Then 0n the hour and for some inexplicable reason the tow stopped and so did the fishing. Looking around it appeared that most anglers had also stopped catching and for those like Charlie Barnes who was still tacking up would have missed out on this golden hour because the fishing from then on was a real struggle. It was interesting to watch Chris Rolfe regularly switching between the lead for Carp and the pole for Silvers – plenty of indecision here.

By switching around the peg with GB laced with maggot I was able to catch the odd 8oz Skimmers to take my Silvers total to 12lb for 8th in the Silvers. I did hook an accidental Carp which broke the hook length - bugger.

The match was won by Rich Coles (pictured right) off peg 16 - his home peg – with 47lb 4oz. Rich caught close in down to his left.

Full Result:

  1. Rich Coles 47lb 4oz peg 16
  2. Bob Tilley 40lb peg 11
  3. Ray Bazeley 36-09-0 peg 27
  4. Tony Rixon 38-14-0 peg 19
  5. Mike Jones 29-05-0 peg 24
  6. Terry Bruton 25-08-0 peg 10
Top Silvers:

  1. Mike Jones 29-08-0 peg 24
  2. Dave Gillard 22-0-0 peg 31
  3. Paul Barnfield 19-13-0 peg 34

1 comment:

Chris Rolfe said...

Not wrong there Michael, problem was peg 6 was always a safe bet for a few carp, not now though.