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Diary Of A
Matchman Part 10
by
Giles Cochrane.
Woodland View
Wednesday Open
The season has been underway for a few weeks now and I have been fishing the local circuit on Saturday and Sunday matches because I have been so busy with college commitments over the past month. The reasoning behind this move is that I could go and fish a local match, which usually run between 8:00 am and 1:00 pm, get home and spend the rest of the day working. After a few weeks of this I decided to give it up as a bad job because the fishing has been crap. I am not blaming the draws that I have been getting but the fishing in general is hard going and on most venues bites are hard to come by. Whatever people think about commercial fisheries, it must be said that it is difficult to go back to normal fishing but I am not sure that I would ever want to go back to struggling for bites. The performances over the past few weekends have convinced me to go back to Woodlands for the rest of the summer and switch to Docklow through the winter because it would appear that all the hard work I have put in over the past few seasons on commercial fisheries would be wasted on gin clear canals. I am not knocking that type of fishing and I dare say there is an art form to it but it is not for me.
I have been told that the fishing at Woodlands is superb at the moment and although I have been reluctant to take a break from it, that is sometimes a good idea to prevent you from fishing 'blinkered'. I was due to fish the 'Pole Champs' there last week but I completely forgot about it and as I have booked into the Sunday afternoon match I thought I would fish the mid weaker so that I wasn't fishing blind.
I got there in time for the draw to find that we were fishing Arles pool, which can sometimes be difficult to compete off when front and back deans pools are in. The methods which have dominated this year have been fishing meat and corn on the 5-metre line but as with all commercial fisheries, this approach works better in the afternoon and evening matches. I drew peg 9 on Arles which is a good area as pegs 4 to 12 can usually produce some decent weights but looking at the peg, it seemed that the strong cross wind was going to mean fishing shorter than I would have liked to. I set up three rigs, which would get me through the match but allowed me some options to experiment, as I was not sure what would work. I spoke to Steve Pickup (Jock) in the shop and he told me that the match the previous day had been won with 47lb on the worm and caster but the weights had been a lot higher earlier in the week. I value what Jock tells me as not only is he a brilliant angler, but he works on site everyday of the week and knows the lakes inside out. He suggested that I fished the 7 metre line on the deck and concentrated on that with corn and a little bit of meat as the carp had been backing off it lately due to the constant pressure changes. After about a hour I had one tench and a skimmer and had missed dozens of bites on both meat and corn. Anglers have been catching on red meat lately but I as I was catching some good weights on this bait over a month ago; I doubted whether it would still be as effective.
The wind was gusting which made the presentation difficult but I thought I would try a shallow approach because it was a warm wind and nobody around me had any shallow rigs set up. I started feeding normal meat and had three bites in the first 15 minutes, which I missed, accompanied by very big bow waves exiting the swim.
The carp were there but were not feeding anywhere near the bottom. The reason I had missed the bites was because I was fishing with too much line between the pole tip and the float to allow for the wind. I wanted to fish 14 metres but there was absolutely no chance of that so I had to settle for the 13-metre line and even that was pushing it in that wind. I don't like 'striking' at bites with this shallow method because the fish tend to bolt off so it is better to set the rig up as a bolt rig where the pole can be dropped as soon as a carp is hooked. As soon as I shortened the rig, I had a carp of about 6 lb but the wind was making the feeding impossible and you do need to keep the bait as tight as you can but however hard it was to fish, it was still better than catching nothing so I persevered with it. I did have a few spells where the wind dropped and I put a few in the net but most of the time it was very hard work. I managed to catch around 10 carp in the next two hours but most of them were around 3lb with the odd bigger one from time to time. I found that it was better to ignore the red meat and to feed two pieces of meat and then flick the rig over the top of where the feed had landed, making as much of a splash as possible. This method works better in the flat calm because you can feed a small area and I think the fish are expecting the feed to land in the same place. That is not possible in a cross wind but I was catching carp when nobody else around me was so I was happy to put up with the bad conditions. I have been using some new rig line by Sarfix called Zeus and I have been very impressed with it. It is very strong and has hardly any memory at all. I have fished with 0.14 all day and not got broken once but that may have something to do with not having the carp bolting out of the peg when you hook them.
I kept at it until the wind eased towards the end and I was able to fish about 15 metres, which made a big difference in that I was only having to feed around three times before I had an indication from the carp, and I put 15 carp in the net in that period. It appeared that the carp were further out and it was annoying to think that you could not present a bait properly at that range but nevertheless; I ended up with 25 carp for 83 lb to win the match and although I did lose two off the hook I was happy with that. I think there were a few 40lb weights but the lake didn't fish too well for those who fished on the deck. I am feeling a little more confident about the Sunday afternoon match now but I am aware that the 5 metre line is where you will need to fish on some pegs to be in the money. You cannot ignore the inside line either on certain pegs but that tends to fish better towards the last hour or so. We will see.
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