Wednesday's "Skivers, Unemployed, Old Gits, and General layabouts match" on the Top Lake at Willinghurst (no students this week as I think Michael Sanders is away at Whiteacres) was only attended by 12 intrepid anglers as a few are away on holiday and a few others had to work !
Despite being my "Day off" from match organising, I somehow ended up taking the names, pools money and doing the pegging. However, I am often rewarded with decent pegs when organising matches and this time ended up with Peg 25 on the back spit. This is actually one of my favourite pegs and despite the back spit not fishing very well for a while, I still fancied it for a few fish which is exactly what I did catch....... A few fish !
With the weather having gone a lot colder over the last week, I still intended to fish paste but also have a couple of corn lines as well. After my coaching day with Mr Ringer where we discussed "Blowing fish" etc, I decided to not feed anything on my paste lines and just started off cupping in a small pot of corn and hemp on my other two lines. There seemed to be very few fish in the backspit and after 3 and a half hours, which was half way through the match, I was still biteless ! Harry The Hat was catching a few in Peg 2 as were, Dave Bacon on Peg 8, Shaun whose surname I never remember on Peg 12 and God (Steve Gardener) on Peg 15. By this stage I think there had been THREE fish caught on the four pegs on the back spit.
At 2 o'clock I had my first bite, a fish of about 7lb on one of my paste lines but then that was it until 4pm. Just as I was thinking the day couldn't get any worse, it started hissing down with rain AND Derek White turned up ! Mr White, also know as Derek "The Bok" is usually the kiss of death if you are catching and I don't think I have ever caught a fish whilst he has been standing with me. However, things started to look up as Derek arrived at my Peg as I then had two fish in two casts for about 16lb both on the long paste line which was now showing signs of holding a few fish. Derek remained for a while, basically because it was still raining and I was the only one with a brolly up and I managed to catch one more fish, a carp of about 3lb.
As the rain eased off, Derek wandered off to watch God where he obviously thought he'd learn more and my fish dried up completely. So, that was it for the day, not very enjoyable fishing wise but still better than working. My catch consisted of 4 carp for 25-12-0 which was only good enough to beat the two anglers to my right on the spit.
Now the weather has started to cool, the fish seem to have switched off paste so I might have to dig some pellets out for sundays club match on the top lake and also pray I don't draw the back spit !
Result
Dave Bacon Peg 8 68-6-0
Shaun Peg 12 67-2-0
Harry Clements Peg 2 59-0-0
Jason Morgan Peg 18 58-8-0
