It was off to Witherington Farm for a 20 peg open, all
the usual suspects were there and it was a who’s who of Withy regulars. I had however, come prepared as Stu and I had
snuck down the day before for a cheeky practice where we sat on Selwood and
tried to catch carp on a variety of tactics.
On the day I drew Selwood peg 4 that was a peg to the left of where I
had sat the day before, so I had a rough idea of how to approach the day. There was a bit of banter flying around at
the start and somehow I got suckered into going a quid with Blakey, not the
best plan if I like my money.
I started by clipping up my feeder rod to the island as
this would be my starter line, I then plumbed up a 13m skimmer line, a 5m meat
line and also down the edge to the left platform where I have had fish before
and also to the right in front of some reeds. Bait was pellets, meat, corn and
hemp and at the all-in I quickly shipped out onto the 5m line with a pot of
hemp and meat before casting the feeder tight to the island, pepparami was the
hookbait of choice and the tip went round within 2 minutes. Carp number 1 was
in the net before some people had even finished feeding their pole lines and
casting to the island, next cats was again on the money and the tip went round
after 3 minutes. Carp number 2 was in
the net and I had managed about 10lb in the first 10 minutes, it was at this
point that I fed my skimmer line with some 3mm pellet and a little hemp, and
also cupped some meat and corn down the edge to the pallet.
I went back out on the feeder for another half an hour or
so but the carp had shut up shop by this point so at nearly an hour I had a
cheeky look down the edge to the pallet, this led to carp number 3 to end up in
the net within the first hour and I thought that I was in for a very good day.
However, it was not to be and I then suffered a very slow hour I managed a
couple of skimmers by changing to a smaller hook on the feeder and also changing
hookbait to a 6mm hard pellet in a band.
I had a few looks on the skimmer line and I soon figured out that they
wanted a small ball of my method mix with a few pellets for every 3 fish and
also that lifting and dropping was key. (The practice had come in handy after
all). The rig that I was using was a 4X12 MW F1 slim carbon on 0.16mm mainline
to a 0.12mm bottom ending in a Colmic N501 hook in a 16 for pellet. The elastic
I was using was a soft set pink reflex and this was fine on the most part but I
started to get a few problems when the fish started feeding a bit more gently,
and a few dropped off, I think this was a culmination of the elastic being too
harsh, the hook too big and my hooklength too long, but I didn’t change
anything so only have myself to blame.
I managed another carp from down the edge and lost one
but all the guys around me were hooking and landing large bonus carp on their
light skimmer rigs, I however didn’t manage a bonus and it wasn’t until the end
that I would realise how costly this would be.
The weigh in saw me have 43lb, 21lb odd of skimmers and
22lb of carp, Jon on peg 1 managed 10 carp and some skimmers for 50lb, Ray on 6
had 44lb helped no end by two very large carp one on the tip and one on the
pole. Blakey showed me the way on the skimmers with 30lb of them and nearly
20lb of carp for 49lb, so Jon won the section but the top three weights came from
Cottage and were topped by James Knight with 194lb!! So in all I got a lesson
in skimmer fishing and managed to lose a quid to Blakey that I still owe him.
No comments:
Post a Comment