Ringer racks up double match success!

It’s been a productive couple of weeks for me lately – here’s how I got on in the last two matches, starting with the ever-popular Tunnel Barn Farm winter league round eight. New pool peg 36 for me, not a peg to get excited about but I fancied it for decent team points providing New Pool fished to form, I didn't need a big weight.

On this peg, a lot kick off dobbing bread to the rushes but I always tend to find I catch a few early then lose track of my match with bread, so I opted to start on maggots two thirds of the way across. It was around 2ft deep here. Had an F1 after about 10 minutes and then a nice bonus in the shape of a 4lb carp. No more bites followed so had a quick look down the edge and had two quick F1s but no more bites.

Going back to the original line I had a nice run of six small F1s before that died off. Another look down the edge produced nothing which was worrying, but I did manage two more on us two-thirds line when I switched back. At this point I decided to have a quick look on bread against the rushes and this produced one small F1 hooked in the tail and no more signs! 


It was time to move so I put my 11.5m joint on and moved down the bank a yard expecting a quick response. One F1 in 10 minutes wasn't what I was looking for though so it was time for a rethink. Opened up a new line at 13m to my left down the track in 3ft which produced four more F1s but it was slow going. 
With two hours to go had a quick look on my maggot short line not expecting a bite and sure enough I wasn't disappointed.

I did however have a few tiny indications which made me think I'd catch there late. Just too see I started a new edge line on pellets and when this produced four stockies in four drops I started to think I'd got it wrong bait-wise. This line died as quick as it started though so it was back to maggots. With an hour to go I had two good f1s on my short mag line to my right, so I opened up another line to my left at five joints and feeding maggots frugally by hand.

This worked a treat and with 15 minutes to go I was flying when disaster struck and I foul hooked a carp about 3lb in the tail, which went mad and totally trashed my right hand line before coming off. Suffice to say I never had another bite there and with no resting line the left hand swim soon petered out. 


At the whistle I ended up with 45 F1s for 47lb 6oz and second in the 22, just an agonizing 6oz behind the master Stu Palsar on 44. 
Team-wise, we had a brilliant day with Paul winning extension off my favourite peg 20, Myles 4th off Top 1 and Pemb coming back from the dead with 31lb for 9th on High. This gave us 75 points and the win on the day. Better still, our lead at the top is now 56 so one good round out of the remaining two should see us home.

Next up was the Boddington Ringer Baits pairs match and with 42 fishing I knew a half decent draw was needed. Peg 63 was my home for the day and one that I quite fancied as I knew it had been a good area the day before.

I kicked off on my favourite large Hybrid feeder and orange wafter combo. I’ve been getting a lot of questions of late about the wafters, regarding what they actually are and how they work. For those not in the know, a wafter is a critically balanced hookbait and with the Ringers 10mm chocolate orange wafters in particular they are designed so that a size 12 QM1 hook just sinks them! So if you think about it, when I fish the wafter on a size 12 QM1 when a carp goes to suck the hookbait in, it literally flies up inside the fish’s mouth, thereby making it hard for even the wariest of carp to get away with it!

Anyway, I started off at around 75m and after my first cast was wiped out by a swan just as I was getting to bite time I did manage a pull second cast to get off the mark. It was a decent mirror too, probably around the 15lb mark. This signalled a good little spell and at the halfway point I had six carp in the net for around 60lb.

Just as I was thinking a big weight was on the cards, it slowed right up and going into the last hour I hadn’t managed to add to my tally. Just to see, I decided to go long for my last two casts and was rewarded with two late carp, including a stunning double-figure common. At the scales my nine carp went 90lb 8oz, which when you consider that included the smallest carp I’ve seen in Boddington of 2lb, is a good average size to say the least. This won my 11-peg section and put me second in the match behind Chris Hill with 96lb off peg 13 on the wall!

Overall Phil snuck a 5th with two for 22lb and we managed 3rd in the pairs too.
Well done to snowy Ashington and Maurice Williams on the pairs win with 4 points with the consistent Conleys’, Sean and Karl, second also on 4. A good match overall! I’m now looking forward to the next one in two weeks.