11th November 2007

Milemead fishery open
Only 11 turned up for this one. At the draw I pulled out peg 5 & was reasonably happy.I had prepared for an open water swim, but peg 5 has some of the characteristics of a snake lake as it is 13m to an island, straight out on front. It drops of very quickly & down the track it is about 6” deep, shallowing up again towards the near margins. A careful plumb up found me a nice flattish spot approximately 2 thirds over.It was here that I decided to fish soft pellets & corn over kinder potted soaked hard pellets.I started on a hook in the loop rig, dead depth to a size 18, b911, to 3lb match team mainline.First 10 minutes & lots of bites but strangely all of them missed.Quickly I switched over to a standard rig & started to catch.My plan was to stay on this line for as long as possible, catching anything that swam, but in particular the big skimmers that are prolific.After a couple of hours I had a steady run of fish including one or two hefty carp pushing 4.5lb.I have recently switched to latex for winter & it never ceases to amaze me how quickly you can subdue big fish on a relatively light size 10 elastic.He old adage of the harder you pull, the harder they pull back is so true.I continued to catch steady for the duration of the match but as expected things slowed right down towards the end.A quick look over with half an hour to go on hair rigged hard pellet saw me snare two quick carp, which were the last fish I had.I had lost 3 carp, a suicidal one did me in the rushes & I suspect the other two were foul hooked.It didn’t really matter as I finished up with 29lb 7oz made up of 14lb+ of skimmers & the same amount of carp for second in the match.