A good practise session

I’ve not been fishing for 12 days, partially because we had a few days watching the World Indoor Bowls Championship at Potters in Suffolk (or it might have been Norfolk), and partially because the weather has been so atrocious. High wind and rain were forecast for the days when I thought about fishing...and for once the forecasters were right.

But with the fifth Tony Evans/Drennan  Winter League due to be fished at Decoy on Sunday, today (Friday) seemed a good day to have a final practice. There was an Over-55s match on, but I snatched an extra 90 minutes in bed rather than get to their draw, and I was the only other angler on the complex when I arrived at 10.30 am, with the temperature gauge in my car showing just 3.5 Centigrade, and a cool Northerly breeze dropping the wind chill to not much above freezing.

In the last match I was last on the lake on Cedar 3, and with Cedar in again on Sunday I put my box down on the same peg. The theory is that if I failed to catch much I could convince myself it is not producing at the moment, so the last result was not all down to me, but if I had a good catch it would give me confidence that I had sorted it. Clever, eh?

Around 50 lb

In the event I had a good catch – around 50 lb in 4 hours, mainly fishing pellet over small pots of about four expanders, ten hard 4mm pellets and some soaked micros, which produced mirror carp to 4 lb.

Two things were pleasing – I watched a Mark Pollard video the other day, filmed at Westwood, and I noticed he was pushing the 13 metres pole out using his spray bar, and then resting the pole on it while fishing, but still holding the pole. Normally I use the spray bar only when fishing shallow, but my Octbox spray bar is very good, so I tried using it the Mark Pollard way...and it worked a treat! Pushing the pole out was a doddle compared with  not using any help, and it helped steady the pole in the wind. I do believe I could have used it easily at the full 16 metres.

 

The Octbox Spray bar - brilliant for supporting the pole as it is pushed out; then I rested my pole on it to fish.

The second good point was that I fed a close-in swim with maggot by hand (which most matchmen would do anyway) and I managed to catch on that as well. The first four fish were all foulhooked – a barbel (landed on a size 20 hook on roach gear), two F1s and something else which I never saw. But then, using the considerable inside tow, odd fish came in hooked in the mouth, and they included a 2 lb bream and a tench as well as several F1s to over 3 lb, all on top two.

The best results here came from tripping the bottom with two maggots. On the 13-metre line there was no discernible tow and I had to fish dead depth. Bringing the bait up to eight inches above bottom saw three bites, which were probably liners; fishing with a couple of inches of line on the bottom brought nothing. A 4mm expander brought all the fish except when a 6mm expander resulted in a foulhooked barbel, which gives me confidence on Sunday to use a bunch of maggots over the pellet as a change bait for barbel without putting loose maggots in.

On the Maggot Drowners forums there have been lots of anglers saying that fishing dead depth is not possible because a lake bottom is not flat like a billiard table. Clearly they have never tried it. You need only a patch six inches square with a flat bottom to get a perfect dead depth presentation. That’s why we use poles – to get the bait in EXACTLY the right spot, not approximately. And in both swims virtually all the bites came in just one spot. In the maggot swim most fish came from a good three yards upwind (down stream because of the tow) from where the maggots went in.

There are six different lakes in Sunday’s match, but the fishing at Decoy is pretty much the same on all lakes – probably the fairest commercial in the UK, so I have no preferences, though 26 on Cedar would be an expected banker.