Match Fishing Magazine

If any of you have followed my blog so far you will know that the final round of the Sensas/Garbolino was to be fished this week at Woodland View. After the practice match the week before we were heading into the match very confident, and felt that we could get a good result. We had a slender four-point lead over Daiwa Dorking, so every point that we could score would be vital.

Lee Kerry was to draw our pegs and put three of our five anglers on end pegs, High pool 27 was to be my home for the day. It looked perfect, middle of the lake, flat calm and mild. My only concern was that a couple of the anglers on the lake to my left and opposite had a lot of room. These lads were always going to catch so realistically fourth was always going to be a good result.

With bloodworm being allowed it seemed to be the first choice of bait, however I decided to not take any to my peg. The venue looked perfect for a few fish shallow, so that was my gamble. I took a pint of casters a pint of pinkies and half a pint of red maggots. Two lines were fed with casters at five metres and two lines were fed at 13metres, one fed with fishmeal groundbait to try and catch on the bottom, and the other just loose fed with pinkies for roach.

As the match kicked off it soon became clear that it was going to be quite hard, there were a lot of carp moving and they seemed to be upsetting the roach. I did catch roach steadily for the first hour and thought I would try shallow, straight away I caught three F1s and I quickly noticed several anglers dive into their boxes to set shallow rigs up! unfortunately with the pegging being tight my fish came in little spells whereas the anglers to my left and opposite kept on catching.

At the weigh in my 21lb got me fourth in section, which I was happy with. Andy Power won the section with an awesome 60lb of F1s off the end peg.

It soon became clear that we had done well, Lee won his section, Steve was second and Denty was third but we didn’t know Sam Wildsmiths result. It turned out he was seventh. This gave us 17 points, a great score but Dorking had an even better score of 15 points. It was a tight affair but in the end we won by a massive margin of two points! After coming second in this league last year it was really nice to win it, and considering Lee Kerry is the oldest angler in our team at 27, we have a bright future!

Sunday was all about the individual league at Thorne, I was lying in third up until this round so was keen for a good peg. I didn’t really get it in Peg 194 but it was ok. A simple plan of two bloodworm lines and a caster line was all I felt was needed. The canal is fairly narrow here so 16m put me just a couple of feet away from the boat, perfect for the shell!

My match went like clockwork and I caught steadily on every line, but spent most of my day having an enjoyable day on the caster and had about 60 fish on it. At the weigh in I put 13-7-0 onto the scales and was well happy with this weight. It put me second in the league but I’m still 5lb adrift of league leader Jonny Plows and with Lee Kerry only a pound behind me it will be very close come the end of the league. Wish me luck!

Joe Carass