Always the bridesmaid

Yew Lake, Decoy Fishery, peg 13

I was eating my early-morning porridge (oh yes, we know how to live it up down here in the Fens) when I remembered the prawns. I’d bought a couple of dozen big ones last year and put them in the freezer, so I went and picked out half-a-dozen and put them in my bait bag, together with the pellets, maggots, worms, cat meat, sweetcorn and my sandwiches. You see, prawns have been catching fish on Decoy, and I thought the light colour might make them stand out.

So, porridge finished, I went out to the car. It was 2 minutes to 8 o’clock, and the condensation I had seen on my windscreen turned out to be ice! The sun was already blazing, without a cloud in the sky, and with the water likely to be still stone cold it looked like a difficult day was ahead.

This was a midweek club match – well actually it’s a collection of mates, mainly from the Wisbech area where I come from, but with a few foreigners from Peterborough who are allowed to join us provided they promise not to win too often! To be serious, the standard is quite high, and a couple of former National Champions regularly fish, so a win is something to be proud of.

My peg 13 was just past the pegs I really fancied – 10 and 21, which is opposite - but with just 15 of us fishing we were in the odd numbers on my side and evens on the other side so those two pegs were not in. However, I am lucky in that whatever peg I draw now, in any match on commercials, I am happy. It’s me against the fish – that’s more important than me against the other 14 anglers, though I’m still as competitive as I ever was.

I’d read a piece on simple pellet fishing by Barry Mason in Improve Your Coarse Fishing, and decided to at least start on 13 metres with pellet, which is longer than I normally start on, but which has been winning matchers is the cold weather here. I know Barry and have absolute faith in whatever he writes. So on went a rig for 13 metres, plus another for the bottom of the shelf about five feet out, plus another shallower for close-in work, where the bank had fallen in and it was about three feet deep.

But for the first half hour I put out hair-rigged corn on a straight lead while loose-feeding the pellet swim. This produced one carp of 3 lb and I went onto the pellet, under a 0.5 gm Drennan Tuff-Eye float. Ten minutes later I got a bite and landed a four-pounder. But then – nothing. Meanwhile the two anglers on my right were hitting good carp on two-plus two, so I put a small pot of hemp, corn and a little cat meat into the deep close-in swim to my left. Ten minutes later, still with nothing else on pellet I dropped in with cat meat and immediately hit a big fish which turned out to be about 12 lb! Game on.

A 3 lb barbel followed and I topped up the swim, and went back to the pellet swim which I had been loose feeding, to rest it. A couple of liners followed, and so I laid the pellet rig out straight and seconds later, when the bait was at about half depth, a three-pound carp took it. The fish were obviously up in the water so I made the decision to try shallow.

I fished it hard for 45 minutes, constantly feeding a few pellets and slapping, but did not get a fish, even though I could see odd carp up in the water. Confident that I had given it a good try I abandoned it. At least I wouldn’t spend the rest of the match wondering whether shallow would work. The wind had been really strange – none when we started, then I had a good ripple, then nothing the it suddenly changed from Southerly to Easterly and got really cold. Then, just as quickly, it was back to the South, with ripple occasionally. Perhaps that was why the fish would not feed confidently near the surface – afterwards three other competitors told me they had all tried shallow, and not had a fish between them.

Meanwhile I had also been tossing a few expanders into the shallow swim on my right and I kept on doing this, hoping that the F1 might come in close, while I fished meat to the left. The deep swim produced fish intermittently on meat, but there was no pattern to their feeding. So I dropped in with an expander no more than two feet out from my righthand bank…and hit a barbel. If they would come in that close and were willing to take a pellet I decided I would, reluctantly, have to fish for them. So in went a pot of reds to the deep swim, and a lighter rig for a bunch of five reds on the hook. Obviously I would prefer carp, because barbel fight so hard, but barbel it would have to be.

This worked well, bringing several barbel, to nearly 5 lb, and also the odd carp to double-figures. But even the barbel bites were quite cadgey – not the vicious pulls you can expect in Summer. Then I tried it to the right, and also caught, though in the shallower water they took longer to come back once I had hooked a fish. I had purple Hydro on here and it definitely allowed me to land the fish more quickly than the red 14 I had for maggot in the lefthand swim. But when I put the cat meat rig out to the left, the white Middy 22-24 elastic was even better; it’s still my favourite, but I’m on the last spool.

I could not get a bite laying on, or hanging a bait off the bottom. Every fish came to a bait fished dead depth, and several came immediately after I lifted the bait an inch – no more. I have found that produces more bites than lifting it a foot or two and letting it sink. Just that little twitch seems to provoke the fish into action. I wondered afterwards whether I should have moved my bulk down to within a few inches of the bait instead of being 18 inches away. That’s something I certainly should have tried.

Among the fish were several foulhooked, but I managed to land all but two of these. Then with an hour to go sport slowed and I scratched around, finding the odd fish in about four inches of deeper water another couple of feet out, while Terry on my left put out a hard pellet on leger and had a really good run. In the end that was the difference between us. Top weight up to me was Trevor, the organiser, on peg 7 with 110 lb 2oz but my three nets went 111 lb 7 oz! Then Terry on 15 in the corner weighed 137 lb and I knew that only Peter on peg 16, opposite Terry, in the corner, could also beat me because he was the only other one who had been for an extra net. But he weighed 104 lb, taken from close-in, leaving me in second place for the third match running! A hat trick of sorts - but don't get me wrong, I'm happy about that. And by any standards it's a good start to the season proper.

There were several other 50 lb- 80 lb weights so all-in-all it had been a good match. And as I was packing my bait away at the end of the match I came across a little polythene bag containing six prawns…I had forgotten all about them!! This weekend I have a little two-day event, to be fished on Oak and Yew and I will give them a try. Honestly!