10.09.13

Andy Bennett's Blog - Day Two

Here’s day two of Andy Bennett’s Lindholme Festival blog. Can he build on his section win from day one?


Day Two
Oasis Peg 26

The weather took a turn for the worse on the night of day one. Thunderstorms continued through, which resulted in lot of rainfall. I felt that this match could turn out to be a real struggle; oxygen levels were well down in the 30s when they should have been up in the 80s, so I didn’t really know what to expect. My plan for the day was to fish meat, with a float setup. Recently I’ve been using one of my friend’s handmade patterns, which are a 0.3g mudline float. I have designed these for him for this type of fishing and fished them on 0.17mm N-Gauge and four inches of 0.13mm N-Gauge and completed the setup with a size-14 LWG.
The rig for fishing meat at 5m was another one of the same floats in 0.4g tied up in the same material as the first rig 0.17mm to 0.13mm, attached to a size-14 LWG. I set up another meat line for the bigger F1s and carp, hoping that the margin would produce late on. The lake is in the shape of a canal and widths vary between 14 and 18 metres, so ideally I was hoping for a shorter peg. When peg 34 stuck to my hand I was pleased but didn’t know how wide it was. I was shortly to find out that it was 15 metres wide. I was pegged next to my teammate and Welsh international Mickey Rogerson in 37 and with Ben Roberts on 35 we were in for a good day either way. To start the match I threw 10 bits of meat short and shipped across with a 6mm piece of meat on the hook and a kinder pot full of meat. After around four minutes the float shot under and my first fish was an F1 of around 2lb mark; a great start! All I need to do was repeat the process and we’re away. Second chuck in and another fish of around the 1lb mark was in the net. I couldn’t have asked for a better start to a match; it felt like there were a few fish there.

However, when 40 minutes had passed I was still on two fish, not what I expected. It was the same as the previous day; the only difference was that there was no big method feeder going in on their heads. What was the reason today? My teammate was now on eight or nine fish to my two and he was fishing pellets, maybe I was on the wrong bait? Well, if that was the case then it was tough as I only had meat and ground bait with me. A quick chuck short didn’t produce; I needed to change. So out came the big pot and in went a full 250ml of ground bait. Talk about flicking a light switch! Forty minutes later I’d got six carp and four F1s for around 30lb in the net. Finally I was now well back on track. Ben had also stopped catching after his early run of fish and now it felt my peg was ticking over. There was a lack of F1s feeding around the lake, probably due to the levels of oxygen, but big-potting more bait into the swim definitely made the difference

Now I was picking odd carp up steady at weighing between 2lb and 6lb so they were worth waiting for. I never had a bite short or down the edge, all 33 of my fish came across on the far margin on a piece of meat. I knew that I had some bigger fish than others but I was still shocked when the scales went round to 125lb. Not only had I won the section but the match too. I must say though that when the other lads started catching on different methods I was slightly concerned. However, I was so confident in catching on meat that I put all my faith in it and thankfully it paid off. So two section wins now put me in a great position after the first two matches.

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