Angling Trust Winter League Practice,27/11/2011

This was an important match for me as I had not done as well as I would have liked in the previous round so I needed a confidence boost. After the customary bap at the football club I drew  a peg on the roadside stretch, and on getting to my peg I was told that I would be up against it as the pegs to my left were historically better.

I decided to fish a bread line at 5 and 13m then to try a worm line tight across to the far bank foliage at 14.5m to my left. My bread rigs were a 4X14 and 0.6g pencil float both on 0.12mm mainline to 0.08mm bottoms and 20 B511, the inside rig was set on no.5 Cenex elastic and the far rig was on no.3. The worm rig was a 4X12 Carpa Chimp on 0.18mm mainline to a o.14mm Cenex bottom and a 16 Drennan wide gape match hook, this was set on a medium hollow elastic rigged through only 1 section of my Z9. If I hooked 1 it wasn’t coming off or snagging me in the far bank foliage!

At the all in I fed a small ball of licky bread at 5m and went straight over the top with a 4mm punch on my hook, bites came instantly and in the first hour I had around 30 roach in the net but they were very small so I fed my worm line and had a look after 10 minutes. I had indications instantly across and after about a minute I was rewarded with a roach but then I hooked something alot bigger. It was long, thin, and green and had big teeth so the pike was not attached for long, I fed the worm line with another 10 worms and went back onto my 5m bread line. This had slowed drastically but I was able to keep the odd fish trickling in until I looked on the worm line again, this saw me latch into another big fish but this time a 2lb 3oz Perch was safely transferred to the keepnet.

This was the end of the big fish action across and for the rest of the match I rotated through my 3 lines picking up odd roach on the bread lines but they were very small until in the last 30 minutes I re fed my 5m line and went straight over the top with nearly instant success and a run of slightly bigger roach saw me up until the all out.

I finished with 5lb 8oz and this was only good enough for 5^th in my 7 peg section, but I had learnt alot and gained a bit of confidence in my worm fishing. Next week I will try to put it into practice.