Life In The Old Matchman Yet!

[Catfish Virgin (Still!)]

Early Saturday morning I headed north to the Banbury area north of Oxford to fish an annual Memorial Match organised by another Website. I'd fished this match a couple of times but failed miserably to make any sort of impact. It is however primarily a good social event with a bit of friendly competition thrown in.

The venue was Clattercote Reservoir which is managed by British Waterways Board and holds a lot of carp which run well into double figures. It's a bit unusual in that, with the exception of the dam wall, the lake has a board walk which extends all round the perimeter with the swims spaced out every 15 yards or so. I succeeded in drawing the far end peg up in the relatively shallow end. This is the view from my peg back towards the dam end:



As you can see, there is a "jungle area" behind the boardwalk which is where the carp love to spawn this time of year. Previous years have seen the anglers pegged up here get pretty wet from all "the goings on" behind them!.

In any event, the carp can often be found very close to and under the boards but they take a lot of stopping when hooked. Big mid doubles are fairly common and they immediately know where to head....straight back into the jungle!

So I set up three sets of gear:

• A Method Feeder to fish about 30/40 yards out towards some sunken trees with the main target being carp.
• A "Whopper Stopper" rod to fish tight to the boards consisting of my 1.5tc barbel rod and centrepin reel loaded with 10lb mono.
• A strong pole outfit set up with #16 solid elastic to fish fairly close at about 6mtrs.

I started with the Method using a straight forward mix prepared the night before and sieved when I got to the swim. Corn was the bait on a simple short hair.



Within 20 minutes of starting I had the first "wrap around" which turned out to be a tench of about 2lb. At least I had beaten last years "DNW". Shortly after I had another savage bite which was definately a decent carp. But I lost it as the short 6lb hooklink snapped.

No-one was catching around me but those first two indications were enough to keep me working the Method on a regular basis, but no further indications were forthcoming. So I eventually switched to the two lines I had continually fed with hemp and caster at 6mtrs and alongside the boards and immediately had a 3lb tench on the pole!

Apart from having the end peg, another advantage I had seemed to be the boards themselves. To my right, wire mesh grills had been added to the boards which effectively stopped access to the "jungle". All the boards to my left didn't have that and were open water. However, as I was later to find out (several times!) the mesh stopped at my swim, there was plenty of open water under my platform!



To shorten the story of an eventful last three hours, I ended up with nine tench and a carp all on the pole by alternating between the two inside swims. Although I managed to control most of the tench on the pole, I lost at least four as they made their escape under my feet! I also hooked and lost two big carp on the not so efficient "Whopper Stopper" as they followed the same escape route ( 10lb line...rod hooped over... and not a chance! ).

At the weigh-in I knew I had about 30lb but was also sure that someone in the 40 or so fishing would have 3 or 4 carp to easily beat me. As it turned out, I weighed-in 33lb 15oz and was top weight for some time. But someone had indeed had a few carp for 40lb and I ended up 2nd overall. The carp had only shown up spasmodically and mainly in the last hour or so. It was close but I was well pleased with my efforts and almost caused a shock in what is always a carp dominated venue.

[Norfolkboy]

Well done on 2nd Neil, good result.

[Fishing Forum Admin]

Cracking report ( bags of info ) and well done on the result

[pingu]

top report and fishing neil
well done on 2nd

dave