A good win

Jay Lake, Rookery Waters, Pidley, peg 11, Over 60s

There was good news and bad news at the start of this 14-entry match. I had no sooner opened the car door at my peg when I heard a cuckoo, to me one of the most emotional sounds in Nature – the others are a blackbird singing, the mournful piping of a Curlew, and my favourite, the Skylark singing. This cuckoo was almost certainly the same one which comes to the same bushes behind peg 14 on Magpie lake, every year – though after six hours of unremitting calling it can drive you mad.

The bad news was that the night had been cold, with temperatures down to about 4 Centigrade, so the water was still cold...and there was bright sun and no wind on my swim. So after a Winter of having the wind when I didn’t want it, the Spring has been bringing flat calm when I wanted the wind! Still, a job to do. And that wasn’t made any easier when Alan told me Pete Holland had once taken 175 lb from this swim, fishing right over to the far bank. I said I hoped he wasn’t expecting me to repeat that feat (or words to that effect). I then remembered that last week this peg had had a DNW! Anyway, a job to do...

I actually started across – with the new platforms, huge and covered with Astro Turf, it enabled me to get right across with 13 metres and a dolly butt, fishing an expander in 18 inches of water. But apart from a few liners, nothing after half an hour, so I had a look down the side to my right, in about two feet of water, where I had put in some small cubes of luncheon meat. Nothing there, so I went out in the deeper water, about five feet, just off the platform with cat meat and hit a two-pounder within a few seconds. But then nothing! I went across again, but three metres from the far bank where the water was deeper, still with no result except a single foulhooker which came off.

Determined to do the job properly I put in some meat with a bait dropper, which hopefully would encourage the fish down. Still nothing, not even shallow, so it was back to the two other swims, where after another hour I had three more fish – one on cat meat and two on meat near the marginal reeds. Next job was to see a man about a dog, and I wandered up to Ray in the next swim, 13, to find that he had just two fish to my four.

Things did not look good – fish were swimming about under the surface, but mainly very quickly, as if they were restless. I suspect, as did several other competitors, that the fish think it’s time to spawn, but the water is not yet warm enough; certainly they were banging about in the reeds in places. Nevertheless I started pinging pellets out to the far bank, while I fished the margin, and after nearly half-an-hour I went over there and fished pellet shallow – but it didn’t work.

So after 2 ½ hours I had to make something happen, and concentrated on the marginal swim with a few cubes of meat toss-potted in each cast, and occasionally I got a fish. But the bright sun meant that every time I moved the pole the shadow moved, and I suspected that in the two feet of water it was spooking fish. So I took off the pole pot, and immediately got more bites – just that little bit of round shadow being removed made a lot of difference. I then used the big pot to put in just half-a-dozen cubes before every drop-in.

Between odd fish inside I had the occasional one on cat meat in front of me, and a pattern emerged of catching no more than two fish before I had to move swims. The fish were mainly around 3 lb, but one went about 8 lb, and boy they really scrap here.

The sun was still beating down, and the bait still felt ice cold when I retrieved it and I guessed the fishing was probably difficult all round the lake. So I made the decision to stick with my two swims, though in the lulls I dropped in the other side of my platform, and went out to the deeper far bank swim for 30 seconds at a time, to see whether a bonus fish might turn up, but it didn’t.

I found I had to induce almost every bite on the meat by lifting or dragging it, and it was hard work, but every ten minutes or so another three-pounder would oblige. I had dead maggots with me, but decided not to put them in, as I felt the fish were not actually rooting about for food, but attracted by food falling, then hanging around looking at it and then taking a moving bait more out of habit than any actual need. That was why I put mainly sweetcorn into the other swim - simply because it was visible - and kept lifting the cat meat to get a bite there. I finished with two fish in the last eight minutes in the margin swim, on my luncheon meat, which was almost my best spell of the whole day!

On Rookery Waters you have to take three nets and split the catch as equally as you can. I was first to weigh, and I was happy to total 74 lb, which I guessed would probably at least frame. I helped weigh in the first three or four pegs and looked enviously at the ripple on the stretch from peg 38 to 47, where an Easterly wind was putting a lovely wave on the water!

Then I went back and was able to do my good deed for the day when an angler told me his bankstick and net were in the water, having been blown there by a freak just of wind (though I didn’t remember any). I carry with me a long, heavy sturdy Garbolino landing net handle to which I have attached a sort of hook, and this is invaluable if I get hooked up on the bottom. I hook the hook round the line (assuming it’s near enough to reach), twist the handle a few times, and my rig almost always comes free. It also helps if a fish takes me into far bank vegetation, as I can hook the elastic well out, twist, and pull it back without handling the elastic.

Anyway, this hook eventually found the sunken net, which was empty of fish. And a few minutes later Ray signalled to me that I had won, with 69 lb second from the same peg Chris Saunders had won on last week, and 46 lb by Peter Rayment third, both on the stretch with the waves. So I regarded that as a good win against a bunch of regulars on a water I don’t regularly fish.