AT winter League Round 5, K&A Canal 4/12/11

This was a round that after last week I was looking forward to as the canal was clear and cold and I believe that this plays into my strengths BREAD. To this end I had packed bread and a bit of worm and caster, so this would be my plan for the day. Barry drew me out B7 and this saw me off to another part of canal that I have never fished before, Wolfhall. On getting to my peg I had a reed bed in front of me at around 13m and I earmarked both edges for worm lines and then I could use the front for a desperation bread line, I set up the same rigs as last week and also a lobworm rig that consisted of 0.18mm to 0.14mm Cenex, a size 10 hook, a buoyant stumpy float and a short length of medium hollow elastic down my top kit. The plan was that if the float went under whatever was on the end would end up in the keepnet. My bread rigs were again the 0.12mm to 0.08mm and size 20 B511’s on pencil floats and no.5 or no.3 elastic. I did however, have a little time before the all in so I also set up a 3.5m whip to fish over the inside bread line, this had 0.12mm mainline to a 0.09bottom and an 18 B511, the float was a 0.5g Drennan Pinkie. The all in came and I fed a small ball of licky on the inside line and also lobworm on one side of the reeds and dendys on the other, I shipped out the short pole and missed a bite straight away before landing 2 roach on the bounce, this was enough for me to try the whip. Although, it was not frantic I was able to put short runs of roach into the net over the first hour and I ended up with 33 roach in the net, the swim had slowed so I tried the worm lines to no avail. The golden hour had finished and although I was only a peg away from the end peg I could not put together any decent runs of roach, possible due to pike but I will never know for sure. For the remainder of the match I rotated around my worm lines and two bread lines at 4m and 13m for a total of around 90 fish, I only had 1 bite on the worm lines all day and can only think that I should have fed them then fished them sooner rather than leaving them for an hour so all the bait could get eaten!

The final round is on the Bristol Avon at Chippenham and Melksham so that should be fun.