Fennes fishery match

This week saw the temperatures plummet on the Thursday and stay around 0c for the next couple of nights, so Sunday was looking to be a hard day for fishing! On the morning I drew on the match lake, which is where I wanted to be, I even managed to draw peg 7 which was in the right area, or at least I thought it would be. There were only 25 pegs put in on this lake, so we were fairly spread out with 1 or 2 pegs either side of us, I felt as though this would be a big bonus on the day considering the sudden drop in temperature.

My peg is in the deep area of the lake, which is normally where the better bream and f1s head to when it gets cold, only problem was that im stuck behind an island, and the next person on my right, 3 pegs up, was in the open water swim in-between the islands, this tends to be where most fish hold up, and if anyone is going to bag up all day, its the 4 swims that have access to this area, not being one of them I knew I would have to work quite hard. The open water swims are very easy to fish, this time of year, an open end feeder with dead maggot will normally keep going round with bream, corn can sometimes pick up an odd f1, or if your sitting on top of a bunch of f1s then nothing beats pop up bread!

I started my match by feeding a chop worm, caster slop at 10 meters. I decided to fish 10 meters as this is where it drops off into the deeper water, its about 6-7 foot deep here, although you can fish further and fish on the heads of the bream at about 14 meters, where its about 7-8 foot deep i felt as though this would be hard on the day as the wind was gusting, and i wanted to catch roach in between my bream, which meant an increase in speed shipping in and out would be vital, so 10 meters felt good! I also decided to keep trickling in a few casters and hemp 45 degree to my right, because if it was hard I may have to roach bash to hand! I then proceeded to chuck the feeder out about 3/4 away across just before the lilly pads off the island, after 10 motionless minutes on the tip I decided for another cast, which equally didn't move! The bloke to my right hadn't had anything, nor to my left, so I wasn't worried at this point. After 40 minutes and 6 casts I knew I didn't have allot of bream in front of me, I tried a bomb with pop up bread to also not get a bite!
I decided for a try on the pole line, out I went with a caster and in came a roach, a 4oz roach, so I wasn't complaining! I repeated this 6 times, catching good roach each time when the float buried and my 9 hollo came flying out of my pole! Back it came and bream no 1 was in the net, my next 2 put ins produced another bream and a skimmer, then it went dead! 10 bite less minutes switching between worm and caster. So i put another pot of slop in and back on the tip. Bite less. Back on the pole, and I was back into good roach, unfortunately the bream didn't return, for the rest of the match I had a method where I basically fished 20 minutes on the pole, put another pot of slop in, and chucked the tip out for 5 minutes. I was hoping I may pick up 1 or 2 bream on the tip by doing this, unfortunately it never happened! With an hour to go I decided to feed 3 big pots of the slop on my pole line, in the hope that if there were any bream in my peg this would pull them in! I had no choice but to make this change as the bloke to my right had caught 7 good bream that id seen, and the bloke to my left had stuck on the feeder all day and had 4, I felt as though I was 2 bream Behind the guy to my right as id had allot of quality roach. So a positive approach was required. I went over the line again after 5 bite less minutes on the tip, and instantly onto quality roach, the odd 8oz one too! I was getting a bite a chuck. I had 2 decent perch pushing the 1lb mark and with 10minutes left i had a nice 3lb bream! Bonus! In the last hour the bloke to my right had caught 2 more slabs!
Come the weigh in I didn't think I had enough to beat him, I knew it was close but felt he had pipped me! He was weighed first and had 21-8, the scales then headed to me, and I was very happy with my bag of fish, another good mixed bag, and with compliments flying my way as I poured them into the weigh bag, i was happy with my efforts! I weighed 22lb! Just pipped him, and I had just 3 bream! A real solid bag of roach from what seemed like it could have been an incredibly hard day! some people blanked! many only managed a few pound!
The result was that i had won my section and was top from the 3 sections weighed so far, on the other bank someone had sat on some f1s and managed a good 57lb of them on pop up bread, the bloke to his left had managed 40lb of them, and to his right 25lb. so i was fourth on the lake. More importantly in the main payout! The results from the other lake came in and it had been incredibly hard, with only 3 people breaking double figures, unfortunately one of them had 2 great lumps for 26lb and the other had 35lb with 3 lumps!
Thats just how it goes sometimes! You cant win them all and you cant always draw a flyer, you can simply extract the best weight from your peg as you see possible, and on the day I knew id done that if not more, so I was happy with my performance. Section wins and consistency I tell myself!

Next week is off the the river Chelmer for another inter club match, hopefully I can draw the area I fished last time as I had a great day catching roach on hemp! I've not fished the other stretches that are in but I look forward to it anyway!

Please leave comments for suggestions on how I can improve my blogs, I will hopefully start to include pictures soon aswell!

Thanks for reading andTight lines,

Reece Hearn