Match Fishing Magazine

Semi finals are always tense affairs and with this one being at Woodlands Nr Thirsk it was always going to be a peggy match to say the least! All we could hope for was a decent draw and a good team performance.

We got the good draw that we needed and one that we were confident of qualifying from. I got massively luck and actually drew Skylark 15 AGAIN! I was almost embarrassed when Lee handed me my draw but I had a job to do and with the pegging being very tight I didn’t think I would need a big weight to win the section.

The pegging was a little bit funny and the two end pegs in my section had a massive advantage, and with good anglers sat on those pegs I feared the worst. My plan was quite simple as I had to catch carp to do any good and with me catching all my fish on the Method last week I fancied that to be my main approach this week. I also set up a bomb rod for fishing popped-up bread and two long pole rigs and one short pole rig for fishing for roach (which I was never intending to fish for).

At the start I simply cupped in 4mm pellets and corn at 14.5m and threw about 50 casters and 50 maggots short and then plopped my feeder at about 20 yards.  This seemed to be quite an important thing as it allowed the fish somewhere to back off to and also the anglers opposite were casting to the middle so I was hoping they would spook some my way.

My match started off very slowly and after 20 minutes I’d not had a liner or any sign for that matter. Sean Barber to my right had, had two carp on his first two casts, but then out of the blue I got a pull and a brief scrap saw a 3lb mirror get me off the mark.

Two more casts in the first hour both resulted in 3lb carp and I was doing ok in the section. I managed one more in the next hour but as a whole the lake was fishing very hard. It was a funny time and a lot of anglers were now chopping and changing methods, I knew that to win the section I would need to stick on the Method and wait for a few pulls. Luckily this paid off for me and in the last 90 minutes I snared another ten carp. The important thing was to cast out and leave it until it went round! A lot of anglers were casting around every 15 minutes but I’m convinced that it just spooked them into my swim!

At the weigh in I had 49lb,which won me the lake and the section and was also 6th in the match, so got me some more county points. On the team front we had seven really good results but the rumour was that our three anglers on Partridge had struggled.

We had scored 44 points, which we were concerned about getting through with, as normally you need a score in the 30’s. Fortunately we scraped through in second – happy days!

Our team had done really well, but Fox Match Trentmen had done even better and produced a true team performance and deserved to win the day with 33 points – well done lads!

Joe Carass