June 12th 2011 - First Club Match of the season
Entry posted by Maddog
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Welcome to my blog, this is my first blog of any type so please excuse if it is not very good reading.
This blog will follow my club match season and any other trips I manage to fit in between matches.
I used to match fish alot against some top anglers mostly at Gold Valley until several years ago, I haven't match fished for a few years and just fancied getting back into it but on a more local scale.
I joined the Verulam Angling Club last November and I am so glad I did, they have some lovely venues and a friendly match scene.
The first match of this season was last Sunday and the forecast was for rain moving in from the west in the afternoon, it rained from 9am and kept raining all day!
This match was on a club owned venue called Riverside Road in St Albans and is notorious for being great when pleasure fishing (even if very busy) but alot tougher in matches, 33 entries for this one.
I drew peg 50 which does have a mahooooosive feature in the form of a fairly large tree leaning in the water on my right.
The lake is fairly uniform in depth at around 5ft so I fed 1 spot slightly to the left at around 9 metres and another at the same distance towards the end of the tree, my main line of attack would be the third spot at 4 metres to my right tight to the tree branches where it was around 3ft deep.
I started on the open water swims having fed a little differently in each spot but nothing was forthcoming even using maggots.
After 40 minutes I went to the tree swim with corn hookbait, this brought a couple of unhittable indications so I tried expander pellet and after a short wait this produced a bite which resulted in a lovely crucian of 10-12oz. Over the next hour or so I manged another 7 or 8 crucians of various sizes and then it went all quiet.
I thought the absence of bites might be a good sign, that carp may have moved in but no more bites until an hour from the end and one more crucian.
10 minutes later the float shot under again but this time the culprit pulled back! At last a carp around 4lb. That was it but the lake had fished hard yet again and my 7lb 14oz was good enough for 3rd.
Official club report can be found HERE.
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