Division 1 National, River Trent, 9/8/14

This week saw us back in Grantham doing our final preparation for the Div 1, this as usual consisted of a team meeting and then something to eat, lots of chat about all things fishy and then a broken night’s sleep.

The morning came and the draw team deployed out nice and early leaving the rest of us to play with our bait eat breakfast and then join them at the draw venue, we had decided to all park together so that it would be easier after the draw and then we descended upon the venue.  It was as usual filled with the buzz that only the national brings and I bumped into a few friendly faces such as Buzzer, Ditch and Gary and the banter started in full swing, especially as a few of them had already heard about my day loosing barbel after barbel the week before.

The time was soon upon us and Gaz did the honours as team captain, the sections were spread out between Hams Bridge and Laugherton so there was plenty of room for the 420 anglers. Gaz called out the names and I ended up on E34 which put me onto the famous Holme Marsh stretch of river, we wished each other luck and then bugged out in true military fashion from the car park.

The drive was pretty uneventful and I was soon driving across a field full of massive bullocks to get to the river, in the middle distance to my right were the famous buoys where we had been a couple of weeks before when Scott caught his bream, and I was hoping for good things. However, fate had a different idea, at the gate to get in I had been chatting to the steward and he took a sharp intake of breath and said that there might be a few roach on a maggot feeder but other than that it would be hard. Yeah right I thought and carried on anyway, you have to take a lot of this with a pinch of salt as the river behaves differently with 40 odd angler on a short stretch and it might also have been tactics to make me worry.

When I got to my peg I was met with an area that I have fished before, I drew it on the RAF challenge before the last national so I knew that it was going to be a tough day, made worst by the downstream hurricane.

 

I remembered my sign

I waded my box out into the margins and proceeded to sort out my kit and bait for the day, I set up two feeder rods, one for 2/3 of the way across just short of some weed that I found by pulling a lead around and the other tight to the far bank reeds if I needed it.  Also set up the pole to fish a comfortable 9m, on here I set up a 1g and 2g rig as it was only 4 feet deep but the flow was very powerful so I needed some weight down the line to let me control the float. It didn't take me long to get set up and the rest of the time was spent trying to set a pole roller so that it would not blow over and mixing my two different groundbait mixes.

It was also just my Luck that Gary from Devizes was on the peg to my left, so I had someone to shout at through the wind, we even decided to go a quid. I was ready for the all-in and fed 4 balls of groundbait on the pole line rich in hemp and caster, then started on the feeder. It was tricky to see the bites in the wind and it quickly transpired that I had the wrong tip in the rod so I was up the bank swapping it out for a stiffer one. 5 minutes later I had a hook in the water again and straight away managed to put a couple of small roach and dace into the net. The guy 3 to my left had a bream so I spent the rest of the first hour on a large hookbait looking for a bonus. It never came and I was quickly trying the pole line, now I straight away I was getting a bite every run through but hitting them was a nightmare and when I did the fish still had yolk sacks so I started topping up with small balls of feed rich groundbait, changing the depth and trying all permutations of hook baits to no avail. I even tried blasting a maggot feeder to the far reed line with no indications so I plugged away back on the pole line along with the odd look on the feeder for the remainder of the match, I found that I would get a quick run of fish for every small ball of groundbait that I fed, I would also get 1 or 2 roach every time I looked on the feeder line and these were of a better stamp at about an ounce a piece.  But in all it was grim, even Grant and Ian couldn't cheer me up as they walked the bank to pass on information, the only plus side was that the two guys downstream of me and a few upstream were also struggling.

As the all-out was called I felt deflated as after all the preparation and practice I thought I had been beaten by the draw bag, I packed up slowly, reasonably confident of a kilo even though I had a chublet of ¾ of an ounce jump to freedom out of the keepnet. This seemed to be a theme of what people around me thought they had, the guy with the bream had 1.9Kg, Gary snuck a couple of better roach out on a maggot feeder for 1.3kg and I managed 1.0kg for 11points. This was sure that this would be enough for the teams lowest points but unfortunately I was wrong on that front as well. However we did manage to finish 24^th and this was enough to beat a few good teams including GBMV, Swindon ISIS and Browning Hotrods.

The mood at the presentation was mixed but as we all said our farewells we were happy overall with what we had achieved, and looking forward we always had the Commercial national next week.

WHAT I WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENT:

I have chatted with a mate and he said that these are the best bits of blogs and good reference so here we go, I don’t feel that I had all my options covered, I should have set up a waggler even though the wind was awful I would have been able to get some bait out on to a 13-16m line and I could have fished it there. I should have also listened to the local and dropped a maggot feeder onto the tip rod after the first hour’s lack of bream, as this would have been better for the roach that I was catching on that line. I don’t think I could have done much more on the pole line apart from possibly putting an 8m whip over it, ah well, I had better start practicing whip fishing before the next Trent national.