So it was back to my old stomping ground in Chippenham on the Avon, and after the previous round I was looking for a better result so that I might be able to get my mojo back and start to get back up the leader board again. My day started at 4am with an alarm clock going off in my ear as I had to pick Chris up at 0445 so that we could get on the river early and peg it for the day’s festivities. We had a good run and arrived at Riverside drive at around 0620, it was still pitch black so the pegging was done by headlamps and torches, we had 39 pegs to place and a couple of areas to avoid, namely the straight known as the dead stretch and also the peg that I nearly blanked off earlier in the year. That said we ran A section all the way through Riverside drive and a couple down on Westinghouse drain, putting nearly every peg in due to the lack of flow, B section then started at the shallows in the trees and although we missed out a few pegs towards the end of the line of trees ( we could see the weed and bottom all the way to the far side with pants torches) it still finished well before the Sailing club on some half decent pegs. Finally C section was started at the blue bridge and we ran it downstream into the park trying to leave out as many big gaps as possible to keep it as fair as possible. Pegging the match length let me see which numbers that Ian would need to pull out for us later that morning and the perfect draw would have been A1, A7, A11, B4 or B11-13 and anywhere in C section, as I thought that these pegs would give the team the best chance of a top 3 in each section. Eventually Chris and I got to the draw location, had a breakfast and then the work began. Ian came through the draw and the team had the following, Chris A9, Ian B13 and I was on C1, it looked good on paper with Chris being on probably the favoured peg but both mine and Ian’s could produce with chublet in Ian’s from the far bank and the same for me under the tree cover.
I dropped Chris off at Riverside Drive and then found some roadside parking barely 100m from my peg (Result); I pushed my barrow down the path to my peg and was happy with what greeted me. In the half light when we had been pegging it I had not really looked at the peg but now I was happy with marginal shelf weed and far bank cover it looked good for a few pounds and I decided that even with the lack of colour and flow my target weight would be 3Kg.
So I started setting up rigs and decided on fishing a single pole line down the middle at 13m with bread, wag and mag across under the trees and also put a worm line in just past the weed downstream for a perch. I set up a 0.75g Carbo on 0.12mm Cenex with a 0.08mm hooklength of the same material and a 20 B511, this was shotted with a bulk of no.8 shot 18 inches from the hook and 3 no.10s spread under the bulk, this was rigged on no.5 Cenex elastic through 3 sections. My second rig for the middle was a 1.25g DS 14 H with the same line, elastic and hook as the other rig but this time the shotting pattern was an ollivette 2 feet from the hook and 5 no.12 droppers. My waggler rig consisted of a 14ft Browning Zitan match rod, Black Magic reel loaded with 3lb Maxima mainline, a 3BB Browning loaded insert waggler attached by a caraluso waggler adapter, a 0.10mm Cenex hooklength and a size 20 Drennan wide gape match hook. I also set up a worm rig and plumbed it up but that’s about it so I won’t go into it.
I called the all in (Even though I was not ready) and then shipped out a ball of bread feed onto my 13m line, the Carbo rig closely followed it and I had a bite first drop in that I missed, and the second that again I missed. Already frustrated I came down a punch size to 4mm and started to hit the odd bite, Roach at around 10 to the pound and a couple a bit bigger started to come in and at the end of the first hour I had 16 roach in the net for around a Kilo. The bites had slowed so I re fed with a small nugget of bread and threw the waggler across for 5 minutes; this gave me 3 small perch so I went back onto the pole line. It was around this time that disaster struck!
The story is as follows: a month ago I went fishing at Nutford on the Dorset Stour, the field was full of cows but I decided to fish anyway. Whilst I was getting a bucket of water to make my groundbait up with I had a very inquisitive cow stamp all over my kit and it managed to hit my rod bag without me noticing. I fished for the day using the pole up to 11.5m and did not notice anything wrong with it; however, the cow had split the 14.5 and 13m sections and also put long hairline fractures into the 10 and 11.5m sections. I replaced the two bottom sections last month but thought the little cracks would be ok!
Back to Chippenham I was missing a few bite so I decided to work really hard at hitting them, but I got a little carried away on one and the 11.5m section broke in 2 right on the crack that the cow had put into it. I was not a happy bunny. I telescoped the sections through and carried on but I needed a break so walked my section taking a few photos for the newsletter. On my walk I saw people struggling to catch bleak, or anything and it transpired that the whole river was fishing desperately hard so I was doing alright, Pete Coleman however, was catching the odd better perch and I saw him landing one of about a pound as I walked past. I needed to get back to my peg and get my head down so I did, it was still hard but the fish turned on a little in the last hour and I caught 3 chublet for 12oz and also a few Roach on the pole line saw me add around a pound in the last 30 minutes.
The scales came round quick and it really had been hard, my 33 fish weighed in at 2.230kg so a good day had been had however, Pete had emptied his swim of perch and his 8 fish came in at 3.240kg so he had done me by a clear 2lb!! At the results this proved to be enough for 1st and 2nd in the match for the pair of us as well, so the stretch had fished really hard, at the end people were moaning about the pegging but I was fine with that as it certainly was interesting. Congratulations again to Pete and the next round is on the Kennet and Avon Canal at Bishops Cannings so more bread fishing for me.
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