Hello once again.
Most of my fishing time has been taken up by fishing matches in the build up to the Division 1 National on the River Trent on 21st August.
The first match was fished at East Bridgeford near Nottingham. This was a match were I struggled a bit to say the least. It mainly involved me discovering that my gear is not quite up to scratch. It was a nice sunny day and the river was clear and the level down. Like everywhere else a lot of rain was needed to flush the river through and add some colour to encourage the fish to feed more freely.
About 18 turned up to fish and I drew paper peg 6 upstream from the carpark. I set up a stick float rig and a feeder rod. The float fishing was difficult due to a downstream wind, I tried to cure this by adding a backshot about 2 feet above the float. This did help with presentation and I was able to control the float better, but with hindsight I should have fished a waggler. My feeder fishing was a disaster. I set up the wrong weight of feeder and struggled to hold bottom correctly. Each time I reeled in I had bust maggots, but I was not seeing the bites. I messed around with the set up but I should have concentrated on the float fishing. I ended up with 2lb of small roach and dace on the float, which was probably the lowest weight from my area.
After the match I realised I needed to get my gear right, at the moment I do not have a good enough range of stick floats and my feeder fishing set up is totally wrong.
The next match was at Shelford, which is a couple of miles upstream of East Bridgeford. Before the draw the locals were predicting a poor match as the pegs had hardly been fished and if the bream did not feed then there is not much else to be caught. The bream in this area are up to 9lb and swim in a large shoal which is several hundred yards long, or so the locals say! So a big weight could be on the cards or it would be a bit of a grueller. Have a guess which one it was!!!
The weather for the day was breezy overcast and some rain about, however the river was once again low and clear as any rain that had fallen had no effect on the river as the surrounding ground is so dry. The weather conditions were OK for bream, but the clear water might still prevent them from feeding properly.
I managed to draw a peg in the bream area which was downstream of the carpark, the match was pegged with 20 pegs upstream and 20 downstream of the carpark. This was to be an out and out feeder match so I only set up 1 rod with a groundbait feeder with chopped worm and casters in the feeder plugged with 50/50 Senas magic and Black lake. The darker groundbait is added for the clear water and Senas Magic is apparently good for bream and skimmers. For hookbaits I would try combinations of maggots, casters and worms.
I cast a few feeder fulls of bait out in the middle of the river and started fishing with double red maggot on the hook, just to see if I could get a quick bite. After 15 minutes a couple of people had caught a bream, then my tip bounced and I struck into a reasonable fish. After a couple of careful minutes I guided a 3lb bream over the net. At this point I thought that as 3 of us had caught a bream at around the same time there might be a few more fish caught. However that was my one and only bite of the whole match. In the end two bream for about 14lb won the match and the rest of the weights were made up of 1 or 2 fish. My 3lb fish was one of the babies and I just missed out on my section as someone else caught a bream that was slightly bigger than mine. The upstream pegs were very poor, but a couple of people stuck it out and managed 3lb or so of bits, so there might be some small fish to go at.
It was a poor match and not the sort of section I would want to draw in the national.
The next week I travelled down to Newark Dyke with team captain Craig Richie. Newark Dyke is a channel that splits from the main river above Newark and runs through the town and rejoins the main river again at Crankly Point below Newark. Newark Dyke will form 1 complete section in the National and on the day of the match around 16 turned up. With this in mind the pegs were spaced out and on the better pegs that had produced before.
I drew peg 42 (see picture above for a view downstream from peg 42) just a few pegs down from the carpark at the end of the track next to the river. This peg had won a previous match with bream and skimmers, so once again I set up a feeder rod and this time decided to go with a waggler down the middle of the river. On plumbing up the river was around 10 feet deep down the middle and had 2 distinct shelves on each side of the river. I aimed to fish the feeder about 3/4 of the way across before the water shallowed up again. I started the match on the feeder, again putting a few casts in to get some bait in the water. I also started feeding around 20 maggots and some hemp for the waggler.
At first the feeder started OK I got a few small fish, 2 of which were grabbed by a small pike as the fish were brought over the near shelf. Pike don't count in the matches so I was glad that they came off. I managed a decent size perch and then lost a better sized fish in the nearside cabbages. I think it was a bigger perch and not a skimmer. After that things went very quiet on the feeder and I could not get any bites. I was starting to think that the fish were shying away from the groundbait. So after an hour I picked up the waggler rod and had a few runs down. The weather on the day was quiet good, warm sunshine and a bit of a breeze. The breeze was coming from behind me which helped casting and did not drag the line around so the float got a good run down the swim. I have not fished the waggler on a river for a long time but I managed to hit most of the bites I was getting from very small chub and the odd roach. After a while a decided to half the depth to around 4 feet on the rig leaving just 2 No.8 shot at 1 foot intervals down the line and ran the float down some more. Again I started to catch small roach with the odd bigger one. It was no different to fishing at full depth and I also feel that the majority of the fish would be in the upper layers of the water. At this point it was a case of sticking at it and trying to build a weight of fish up. After a while the float disappeared and I struck into a much better fish, I took my time and after a couple of hairy moments with the nearside cabbages I netted a chub that was over 2lb. This got my hopes up and I concentrated even more. I tried to vary the feed pattern by either casting then feeding and vice versa to see if it made a difference to the catch rate, but it remained pretty similar all the way through. As the match developed 2 distinct areas were the fish were caught developed. If I got a bite almost immediately it was from a very small chub and about 10 yards down the peg I caught roach and the bigger chub. There were a couple of people walking the bank saying that the match was a struggle for most, so I kept on plugging away hoping for some more chub. In the end I managed 2 more and lost 2, one of which was a really good fish, when I struck it just stayed motionless in the current, but the hook pulled. At the end I weighed in a level 8lb which was good enough for 3rd place which I was very pleased about.
For the next match the following weekend some of the team were going to fish Newark Dyke, but I felt that I would be better off fishing a match on the tidal river. So myself and another team mate, Martin Griffiths fished the Scunthorpe match which would include 3 sections of the tidal river. Once again the river needed rain and a decent sized tide to fish well.
In previous weeks the fishing had been quite patchy. Martin and myself drew in the Dunham Bridge section, so not the best from a practice point of view but good for driving and dropping the gear off. I had peg 12 and Martin fished 16. The pegs were close together which was a bit short for float fishing. There was a chance of barbel along this stretch, so I fished positively on the feeder with a pellet hookbait and I also set up a 7 No.4 stick float to fish about a rod length out which was about 9-10 feet deep. Again I fed maggots and hemp on the stick float and fished with pellets and casters in the groundbait feeder. Once again the feeder was slow and I did not get any bites on pellet or maggot. The fish really don't like my groundbait!!! So after an hour I started on the stick float line. Anglers around me had been float fishing for a while and caught the odd fish, and soon enough I started to catch the odd nice roach. About 2 hours into the match and the flow started to slow down as the tide began to move upstream. Once the flow came to stop so did the bites, it was only when the flow picked up as the water was pushed upstream did bites pick up again. I was catching perch and roach on single maggot and as the water levels rose I had to adjust the depth of the rig accordingly. Luckily I had set up my 15 foot rod for the stick float and I think the deepest the river got was around 13 foot, so I would not have managed using a standard 13 foot rod. Once the tide peaked and the flow reduced again so did the bites. In these quiet spells I tried the feeder again, but again there were no bites. Before the river began to run back downstream again I catapulted a few pouches of hemp and a couple of maggots to create an area of feed a little downstream for the fish to move onto once the flow picked up. Hemp is quite a heavy bait and once on the bottom it will more or less stay put and hopefully the roach will move in. There was a transformation when the river started flowing downstream again I started to catch good sized roach and perch and staying true to form I managed to lose a good fish which was either a big perch or a Chub. I applied pressure to try to keep the fish out of the nearside rocks and the hooklength broke. I had previously tied hooklengths for the trips to river so I was back fishing again in no time. However time did run out, that last hour after the flow turned was very good and I wish I could have carried on. At the weigh in I scaled about4.5lb which beat the angler downstream and was very close to the upstream angler. In all I was 4th in my 10 peg section, most of the fish were caught in that last hour. At the end of the match I was pleased with the float fishing, but the feeder fishing is becoming very frustrating.
The last match to report on is the final match in the Sunday evening series at Meadow View. This was fished the day after my success on Newark Dyke so I was brimming with confidence, however the fish had other ideas. I drew peg 30 and had already made my mind up to fish meat at 5 metres and down the side. By the end of the match I had lost 2 carp and caught a couple of roach. I did not bother to weigh in. I was brought down to earth with a big bump. I now realise that the carp in Meadow View seem to respond best to a pellet approach, and my stubbornness to fish with meat has been costly. 3 more matches have been booked for next year, so hopefully I won't make the same mistake.
On reflection by the end of the month I was getting a bit fed up of driving over 200 miles each weekend with mixed results and more questions than answers. Although I feel comfortable with my float fishing both on the stick and waggler, my feeder fishing and set up is terrible. I still need to get some more stick floats so that I have a good range to choose from and I have ordered 2 new tips for my feeder rod, which will hopefully improve my bite detection.
August sees the big day arrive and also POHAS are on their annual holiday to Bewdley. The holiday is booked for the week before the National, so I have all week to get my fishing and gear sorted for the day on the Trent.
Well that has been a long post, has anyone stayed awake long enough? I will post again at the end of August and include some pictures from the trip to Bewdley and the long awaited Division 1 National.
Tight lines everyone.
