Regional National, Gloucester Canal, 13th May 2012

I picked Ian up at six in the morning and we made the long pilgrimage up to Gloucester for the regional national. I was drawn on peg S17 and did not expect alot when before the match I was getting told that it was one of the tougher areas.

I set up a feeder for across the far side, a waggler for catching bleak and also my pole line at 13m which consisted of a 1.5g Maver Drift float to counteract the depth and skim from the strengthening wind. It was set on 0.12mm mainline to 0.08mm bottom and a size 20 Drennan polemaster wide gape, and I had no.5 elastic through 3 sections to help set the hook and hopefully play the bream in the 18ft of water.

At the all in I fed 12 balls of Leam and Browning canal at 13m which was filled with caster, chopped worm, dead maggot and pinkie. Then I cast out a big feeder with a fishmeal based groundbait across the canal 5 times into approximately 8ft of water, I then attached a hooklength and started the day by watching the 1oz tip of my Champions Choice Stilllwater feeder pulling occasionally with line bite to keep me excited for alot of the day. It was not good however, when around halfway through  the match the tip pulled round and I thought that I had caught my 0.18mm Cenex feeder mainline on another bit of rubbish floating down the canal. But as well as the small branch that had floated into my line there was something significant kicking on the other end, after a fraught couple of minutes I was slipping the net under a decent sized bream. An hour later I missed an indication on the pole and an hour after that the all out was called, my bream went 4lb 2oz and this was enough for 3^rd in the section behind an 8lb and 16lb weights. There had been two other nets with 1 bream in but they were both 3lb something so the long boring day was full of team points but the team unfortunately had too many blow outs and we limped in almost last. Always next year as they say!