13/07/2012, Royal Signals Champioship, day 2

Day 2 saw us all swapping lakes and Pez and I tried something new by drawing for each other, it worked, I put him on a good peg, Snake 15, and he put me on end peg 26 on Lake 4. It was looking good for the team until I found out that the day before only 9Kg had come off it, but it was a start point. When I got to my peg I found the island on my left hand side that extended to the rope at around 40yds, there was a big tree on both sides of my peg and also a really nice margin down to my left hand side that required the bare minimum of gardening.

This allowed me to make an easy plan I was going to fish the pellet wag, method or bomb long and then paste down the edge to my left in the last couple of hours, I set up an 11ft Force Pellet Waggler 2 with a Xitan 030FD reel and 0.18mm mainline. I slid a sliding pellet wag rig up the line with a 4.5g clear loaded pellet wag and terminated it with a 0.18mm bottom to a 16 hook and a bait band on the hair. I also set up a bomb rig on a 10ft Force Commercial bomb and then set up a similar margin paste rig as yesterday for down the edge. At the all in I cast out the pellet wag and was rewarded with a fish on my 4^th cast at around 5 feet deep, this filled me with confidence and with the wind blowing from over my left shoulder I was able to controll feeding and the float easily. This then set the rest of the day, I caught fish on the waggler on and off for the first 4 hours of the match and had 15 fish in the net at the end of this period at depths from 2-6ft, I also caught one on paste on a rig I quickly set up at 5m after watching Ivan on the far bank bag a couple of quick fish. This only gave me the one so at 2hrs to go I fed the edge and had a look, again it took the fish about 20 minutes to settle but then I stopped foul hooking the fish and started landing some better margin fish. I had a further 7 or 8 in the last couple of hours and this was enough to give me another good weight with 55.850Kg and this was enough to take top spot on the day again.

It was a brilliant couple of days and the best bit was picking up not only the individual championship but Pez and I also managed to pick up the team as well. Not too bad.

Here are the full results:

12/07/2012 Royal Signals Champs , Day 1

Day 1, I was running this match ably assisted by Pez This saw me draw peg 16 on Reptile lake, Phase 2, after I had finished with the tidying up of the draw area and then loaded up my barrow it was off down around the lake to get to my peg. Upon arrival I found myself sandwiched between 2 guest anglers, Gaz Evans (Army team captain and Makins Regular) and Rocky (Makins Regular and Army squad member) so I knew that I had my work cut out from the start. Both Rocky and Gaz however were throwing in disclaimers from the start saying that I was on a better peg; well I didn’t know as I had not fished the place since last year. I decided on a simple plan with a method rod and pellet wag for casting into a gap between two islands at around 23m, Meat at 5m to my left away from Gaz and then paste over groundbait down on my left hand margin as I had a platform at 10m.

 At the all in I potted in a half full pot of bait at 5m and then cast the pellet wag into the gap as the carp were showing on the surface, instantly I knew that this was the wrong thing to do as the waggler was making too much noise on the impact with the water and seemed to be making the fish back off from the start. I quickly decided to get off my box and set up a shallow rig to fish at 14.5M towards the island, It consisted of a 0.1g Sconzone wellardz on 0.18mm Hybrid mainline to a 0.14mm Cenex bottom terminated in a PR36 hook with a F1 bait band. I dropped a 6mm pellet on the surface 3 times and yellow Reflex elastic poured out of the top kit, this happened a few more times as I slowly started to trickle bait in on the line. But it was in a straight line with my back up feeder line so before I got too carried away I moved it around 4m to the left more towards the centre of the open water.

I stayed on this for around an hour but I noticed that the fish were starting to back off a bit so I cast out the feeder to give it a rest, the tip flew round fairly quickly and I took a quick 10 fish on this line. I alternated between the tip and the shallow line for the next couple of hours taking fish steadily, I had a couple of looks on the short line but with no indications I stayed long.

With 2 hours left to go I put 5 pots of groundbait down the edge to my left and a couple of minutes later followed it with a rig, consisting of a Big H Bullit paste float on 0.20m  cenex with a 0.18mm bottom finished with a size 5 Tubertini 175. This was rigged on a strong hollow elastic so that I could bag happily,  by this time both Rocky  and Gaz were making charges with decent fish from their edges so I had to hope that I could get enough to stay in front. It didn’t take long and I started to get a few fish from on it and they were of a slightly better stamp than most other people were managing, I kept catching until the all out and at the end I knew I had a decent weight.

The scales came round and I was one of the last to weigh on Reptile, with 58.680Kg, this was more than enough to see off anyone else in my section by around 20Kg so the job had been done for day 1. On the team front, Pez had drawn in a corner on Lake 4, Peg 18 and found himself boxed in, once the fish backed off from in front of him he struggled, but he had done enough for the team with a second in section keeping us in contention for the Inter Unit Championships.