Giovanni Barbato fishes for Guildford Angling Centre and visited Sumners Pond for the first time last saturday. Here is his Guest blog.
Saturday had seen me make the journey to Sumners pond, a match lake that I had heard so much about but had never actually fished before. So arriving down there to meet the lads a minute had gone and I had already been confronted by laughter and jokes from Malloy and his Motley crew. (What a wicked bunch of blokes). It was soon draw time and I put the lucky left hand in and drew peg 16, to me it was just a number, I had quick chat with Terry and he was soon putting me right telling me I was in a good framing area. With a short walk to my peg I decided to keep things simple and only fish 3 lines, 1 at 6 metres with worm and caster and 2 at 14 1/2 metres, with groundbait and then pellet on the other. I started to plumb up and was happy to see a depth of 5 foot on all lines, this is always good to have in the middle of winter especially on a skimmer water. I fished as light a possible with all my rigs being on 0.8 and 0.5 floats knowing there was a bit of depth in this area, the hooks I used were Tubertini 808’s, fantastic hooks and strong enough to land a carp if I hooked one. With banter from Terry Malloy and Sponge Bob flying round the lake, the all in was called, I fed all my lines and started on the short worm line, after giving this 20 minutes I knew it wouldn’t kick off especially with only 4 little roach in the net. It was now time to look over on the long groundbait line with a 4mm pellet, well from then onwards it was a skimmer a chuck all day averaging 4oz to 2lb. It seemed to me that feeding correctly was critical today, so I made sure I kinder potted balls of hard groundbait after every bite, this seemed to keep the fish for a lot longer. What a fantastic days fishing, the problem was it was very difficult to know where the winning weights would come from as everyone had caught a lot of fish. What a fair venue, it was soon time for the scales and I knew Don Garnish and Ian Chatfield had weighed in 30lb a piece, I really didn’t think I had that sort of weight, so the scales arrived and I was happy to have put the winning weight of 35lb 5 oz on the scales and am looking forward to getting back there this saturday.
