Articles

Rob Wootton returns to the venue that can only be described as roach soup!  

After a really successful feature for Pole Fishing a couple of weeks ago I decided to book into the pairs league on the river Welland that runs through the town centre of Spalding. This place becomes rammed with roach all through the winter and it’s been somewhere that I’ve ignored in the past but after loads of good reports I just had to give it a go and several others from my neck of the woods agreed. Last sunday five or six anglers from Leicester including my travelling partner Sam Merry were mingling at the draw, asking about the form of the venue and catching up with mates that only get senn once or twice a year.

All the talk was of how coloured the venue was, me and Sam had a quick look before the draw and although the sun was still firmly below the horizon we could tell that there was plenty of extra water on the venue. My home for the day would be peg 24 this was in an area called the ‘rush beds’ and I could see why - five foot tall reeds stood between me and my swim - my peg would need some serious cutting out just to get near the water. I’d left the shears at home so I’d have to get to work with some chopped worm scissors.

Half an hour later I’d managed to create a gap in the stick ups - it wasn’t perfect but it would do. Setting up was now easy and because of the extra colour I mixed up some groundbait (50:50 Dynamite Frenzied hempseed and brown crumb) just in case the usual bread punch attack didn’t work. I set up two rigs both using Preston PT4 floats the first rig was 0.4g and the second was a heavier 0.6g both of these rigs were also duplicated - I was expecting a busy day so didn’t want to stop for tangles. Two lines were plumbed up and 6 meters and 11 meters, the longer line being earmarked for a groundbait approach but wouldn’t be fed until needed. Both these lines were the same depth which made things much easier.

Before the all in I just had time to go and see Sam and Joe Oakes who had drawn a good area near where I’d shot the feature a couple of weeks ago. The first thing that Sam said to me was how the level had gone down a couple of inches, I’d plumbed my rigs up much earlier than Sam so got back to my peg pretty quickly to see how much the level had dropped. Sam was right! In 30 minutes the river had dropped six inches, I made the alterations on my rigs and hoped the level wouldn’t drop any more.

 Come the all in I cupped one ball of liquidised bread in at six meters and started with a 5mm punch over the top, bites started to come after ten minutes and after thirty minutes I was up to ten fish with the average stamp at about four to the pound, now the problems started. The level had continued to drop and although it was easy to keep altering my rigs to keep in touch with the fish I had failed to notice the effect the dropping levels were having on my keepnet. My box, which had started in the water was now a foot up the bank and the reeds that were covered by water were now showing out to about three meters, this meant that my keepnet was sitting on the reeds and each fish had to be 'shuffled’ down into the bottom two rings. Obviously this sort of problem means that my rhythm was upset constantly - not ideal for a match where numbers of fish are the target.

The swim had a few fish present though and after two hours I’d reached fifty fish unfortunately the level was still dropping and now only one ring of my keepnet was in the water. My solution was to take one of the boulders from the bankand roll it halfway down my net to create a pool of water in amongst the reeds then every half hour I’d walk down the bank and get as many fish from this pool into the bottom ring of my net not ideal and I was hoping that the fish were all ok. The match was turning into a nightmare so many thing s were going wrong and I was always feeling that the peg was good enough for a much bigger weight without all the distractions.

 Come the end of the match I’d lost three rigs and probably four or five pounds of fish around the now protruding reeds at three meters, the river had dropped two feet in total and after moving my keepnet to give the fish a bit more room I went for a chat with Chris Jenkinson on the next peg - I was sure he’d beat me and wanted to look at his rigs and bait. I was wrong, Chris weighed 22lb to my 25lb which was a massive suprise to me - how frustrating though knowing that I could of had much more without the problems the reeds had caused. Back at the pub there was good news - Joe had won the match with 30lbs including several pound plus fish Sam was fourth and I was fifth, the only anglers to split us up in the main frame were Steve Winters and Bob Nudd. What a venue, over 750lb of roach were caught between the fifty anglers, I can’t wait for next week!