I would actually have preferred the ponds option but despite a drop of the wet stuff on Thursday night, the river was only up about a foot on Saturday morning and dropping, with a decent colour.
Arriving at the draw on Sunday morning, I expected to find about 12 of us fishing but was advised by Competition Secretary Pete Turnbull that there were infact 28 and he had to quickly add some pegs on the Sunmead stretch below ours in order to fit in enough decent pegs.
A quick look at the river revealed that it had dropped about 6 inches from the day before and I was quite looking forward to it.
I just knew that having walked the Leatherhead stretch the previous day, I was guaranteed to draw the Sunmead strtch and that was exactly what happened as "Sunmead 8" stuck to my grubby little hand. The peg is the one almost next to Thorneycroft Bridge and is apparently a flier for roach - although River Mole ace Mark Lindsey did blank from it a couple of weeks ago.
Anyway, having negotiated the 30 yard walk to my peg from where Mrs Pikey dropped me off, it appeared to be an out and out stick float peg and I therefore set up my 12 foot Norboron rod, Abu 501 reel and 5x4 Steve Gardener stick float. I did also set up a pole but wihtt he river flowing quite hard, I really didn't expect to use it.
Baitwise I had 2 pints of KC Angling's best casters, a big bag of hemp from Fetcham pet shop and a tin of the Jolly Green Giants finest corn. Most people wouldn't consider corn as a river bait but I would think about 90% of my River Mole chub have been taken on corn over the past three years or so.
The peg looked really nice when I first arrived but seemed to be getting worse as the starting whistle approached as the river was dropping and my peg was beginning to boil. After 2 hours my optimism appeared to be unfounded as my keepnet was filled with 2 roach one dace and a minnow ! A quick walk up to see Hayden Woods (2 pegs but about 400 yards above me) revealed that I wasn't winning the match as he had already had about 7 chub.
Returning to my peg, I continued to catch the odd roach and then struck into a bigger fish which I could tell wasn't a chub but wasn't sure what it was until it came up on the surface and I put my landing under a 2-8-0 perch. The odd dace and roach followed but it was clear that the peg wasn't going to improve and I decided to go for a walk to get some pictures for the blog. As I stood on the bridge Spindle turned up in his car and as I moaned about the lack of roach he said he'd seen 4 cormorants in residence near the bridge for the past two weeks. Having received that info it would explain the lack of roach and dace in the peg and after another fishless half hour I packed up half an hour early and weighed in the grand total of 4-6-0.
As we weighed the rest of the section Bryan Hawkins weighed one big chub and a few small roach and dace for 5-6-0 to win the section as Hayden (pictured below) took second place with 8 chub for 14-8-0.
Mark Lindsey drew "The Door Swim" up the tunnel and showed what a good river angler he is as his 5 proper chub, one small one and a sanitary towel went 14-12-0 and gave him a narrow victory on a day when the river didn't fish well despite looking half decent.
Despite my result, I enjoyed my day and am looking forward to fishing a few more river matches in the coming weeks.
