Before he starts, please note that despite only having 26lb on wednesday I did still take Plummers pound and now that the cooler weather has arrived and he wont catch on a tangerine sized piece of paste, I expect to take many more in the coming months !
I'm really looking forward to the weekend with a match at Rolf's Lake on saturday and a Leatherhead DAS club match on Lake 4 at Monk Lakes on Sunday - but in the meantime, here is Paul Law !
Further to my recent Fish for 3 k Qualifier, I now find myself in deepest Essex at Newlands Hall, it's a 4 lake complex well manicured just out side Chelmsford, with rave reviews and talk of crazy weights in excess of 400lbs this should be quite interesting............. or not.
The Kent massive have been replaced with the Wickford angling boys a tidy looking outfit very smart clothes etc a complete opposite to the hand made clothing spotted so readily at Monk lakes, but what an ugly lot that Wickford are, god help us if the Thames Gateway ever completes and that lot mix.
Today we have 2 of the 4 lakes Moat and Brook the word is if you don't draw on Moat go Home and believe it or not some did.
The Draw
After a brief chat with all and sundry its time for the draw I get in reasonably early today as with these weights we have to get a separate trolley of bait to the peg, I draw peg 20 on Brook, I ask around and try to get some info on my peg or the area, the word is grim, not being one that gets disheartened I load up the trolley and make tracks to my peg, I couldn’t have drawn any further from the van by the time I got to my peg I was dripping the 90 minutes we have to get set up as dwindled and with all the stops for breath and a chat I have 60 minutes to get ready.
On the way to my peg I have walked past quite a few anglers all of them looking glum including my travelling partner Steve Fisher he has drawn peg 6 it actually looks quite nice, also along the way I walk past an island and two spits the spits and the island are the pegs to be on, they just scream out fish, my peg on the other hand was awful in fact I would take a guess the last time it was fished was probably about the last time I was at Newlands around 1995, it was a parrot cage and wedged between two trees the only place I could get a box in was about 5 foot off the water, it was awful, the only way this was going to work was to get in the water, I asked if it was allowed and as nobody knew the answer I thought I'd play safe and sit up the bank.
The Methods
I was told we are on more of a specimen lake the fish run up to 30lb and there isn’t many fish compared to the more favourable Moat Lake and that the method and pellet waggler can play a big part in a weight if they feed, so I get out a ready made bomb rod and method rod and two pellet waggler rods all set up the night before. I clip up the lead rods and cast out one of the pellet waggs, the wind was awful and the waggler was going through as if I was on the tidal Thames, I stripped one of them down and replaced the waggler with a huge Drake bodied peacock which on hitting the water sat there motion less, perfect for the conditions. Now for a pole line, I wasn’t too confident that the pole would be right today add to this the fact I feel as if I'm pointing down at 45 degrees it felt wrong, I had a nice depth at around 7 ft so I hooked up one of my faithful 0.3 ackoo prototypes on a 0.17 to 0.17 and a 14 B911, I decided a few cups of pellet with a little corn and leave it for an hour while I have a look on the method.
The whistle goes.
I carry out the pre bait ritual and launch a method to the middle, with two bits of corn haired off a 16 B911, a few minutes goes past I recast, "nothing" after 15 minutes I switch to pellet and still nothing. I alternate baits and run through the motions "nothing" all the time I have been pinging 8mm pellets on a line about 25 to 30 yards out, so I switch to the bomb and drop it short onto my pellet line "nothing". An hour has gone and not a bite, I have been keeping a careful tag on what’s going on and have only seen John Coster on the other bank catch as he had a carp on the method. Do they really catch 400lb bags here? I decide to give it a shot on the pole, on goes a piece of corn the float dances around lifts and bobs it finally sinks and I'm rewarded with a dinky roach, I don't even know how it got the corn in its mouth !
I persevere with this for an hour taking odd casts on the method and just add 2 more tiny roach, we are now 2 hours into the match, the guys around me have caught nothing either other than a few small roach, I give the pellet waggler a shot and nothing. No wonder people drew and went home.
Halfway in I decide enough is enough this isn’t what I came here for I got off my box and went for a walk. The guy on the first spit has had a couple of small carp and walking further down to the low numbers Jonnie Bell is packing up on the other spit for the rest it is just odd carp. Steve Fisher on peg 6 has one about 8lb and a couple of pound of roach, I get to peg 4 Alec Roberts, well to my disbelief he tells me he has had 12 carp in the first 12 casts he lost 2 of them though and has maybe 50lb Alec has been on fire this year and really has been making the most from his pegs, on peg 3 is Barry Oliver he is also doing well and nicked a couple of lumps and lost a few breaking his pole on another, I walk to the corner of Moat Lake and people are catching not brilliantly but they are putting a few fish together.
I grab a cup of tea from the snax wagon and go back to my peg and when I get back I sit down and have a good look at what’s going on around, John Coster is now nicking the odd carp on the pellet waggler, the guy to my left now has 3 small carp and to my right just small fish
I see a few fish are starting to mooch about on the surface so I decide to give it all on the pellet waggler. After 30 minutes I get a sign as the pellets hit the water around my float the float makes a slight sideways movement, on the next retrieval I shallow up I feed cast and the float buries, I lift into it and to my disappointment the fish flies off like the Orient Express nothing is stopping this, I knew immediately it was fouled, but the clutch and rod does its job the fish surfaces 3/4 of the way across the lake and slowly starts to come back, at one point it even tears through the peg next door and gives him a cracking liner and then he realises its me. after a long battle its in the net its a double a cracking fluke hooked right in the tail.
I now have a little hope, and this really wakes me up and my aim now is to beat everyone to my right all the way around to John Coster, I persevere with this method but no more bites or signs, John opposite is still nicking fish its almost like the fish wont come our side of middle so I switch tact, I get a 3 pint tub of 11mm out of the bag, 11mm pellets in this wind are great they hit the water like stones and im sure when the fish are coming to noise these can sometimes change things around, within a few minutes I get the rod wrenched from my hand, after a good 10 minute battle I have another 10lb plus fish in the net, by now everyone around me is wacking out pellets and fishing the waggler, I get two more bites and 1 more fish a cracking immaculate mirror around 9lb and the whistle goes.
I sit there and reflect on what could have been with a little more homework and 5 hours of pellet waggler I believe a different outcome would have been on the cards for me, decisions are what cost us in this sport, I made a few bad ones today based on lack of knowledge for this place, The long waggler for stability was the right choice along with bigger pellets, I went on to weigh 29lb 8oz second in the section by 3lb and to the flier on the spit, 10lb was weighed to my left and just ounces all the way around to John Coster.
Alec Roberts went on to win in real style and mostly in the first hour while John Coster nicked second with a very steady performance.
To Summarise, I’m not sure what happened to the huge weights as predicted but the lakes certainly didn’t like having 60 anglers throwing bait in on the day
The results are as follows
Alec Roberts........ peg 4 ........90lb 2oz
John Coster.......... peg 32........ 65lb
Mike Evens ...............................62lb
John Southgate .....................59lb 2oz
Jason Collins ..........................58lb 8oz
Barry Oliver........ Peg 3 ........53lb 4oz
The next one for me is Tylers Common in a few weeks
Paul Law
