Sunday 15th April 2007

Milemead Open.
Sixteen of us graced the banks on Sunday at my local Milemead fisheries in tavistock. At the draw I pulled out peg 6 & all my pre prepared plans (as you do) of fishing the pellet wag to some sort of feature went out the window. You see the bank holiday Monday previous, I had sat my bum on peg 19 & caught all day long on the pellet wag for an estimated 75 fish & close on 170lb, the only time I didn‘t catch was when I was untangling line from my new reels. Now these reels are brilliant, but it doesn’t matter how good they are, if you overfill them with line as I did then you are in all sorts of trouble. Anyway back to peg 19, it is a noted flyer & naturally come match day I was going to draw a similar peg wasn’t I? Well no peg 6 it was and I must say I was a little disappointed. You see the peg to the right was empty and I did have a feature being the end of the island with a clump of moving reeds sticking out of it. Perfect for the pellet wag I hear you think, well not really as I forgot to mention it is only 11m away. Now I was very tempted but pellet wag at 11m……..The other option were those reeds & this is where a lot of anglers who are unfamiliar with the venue target, however as I am sure you are aware, these features are often a bit of a red herring, in as much as you spend most of the day trashing & re tying new rigs as the fish drag you straight through them. The other main feature is an under water one, being a bar that slopes down from the island right in front of peg six. Now in the warmer months plenty of carp cruise up & around this bar & if you target it either at dead depth or even better shallow, then a big weight can be on the cards. I have had 87lb from there in a match before, however that was in the middle of summer when the water was nice & warm & this fish were feeding well. But what about today? Well I knew the fish were feeding well, but the water was still slightly cold, well a decision had to be made & I decided on an all or bust pole & pellet shallow approach to that bar.The norm is to fish & feed 4mm & 6mm pellets, but I have been experimenting with 8mm & even 11mm. The reason being is that there are hoards of silvers & they seem to pay the bigger pellets less attention & the carp do not seem bothered. As for rigs well I have incorporated the korum quick change beads into my shallow rigs now, I use a team mosella dibber & a Fox, size 16, series 2, eyed barbless hook with a hair rigged pellet all tied to .20 ultima power plus. The reason for the beads is so I can change hooklenght quickly if I need it longer or shorter without having to set up loads of rigs using up all of my top kits.As you can see it is a very positive set up, with little room for finesse, but I feel you need to give shallow fishing your full attention to get the best out of it so your rigs might as well be robust & positive.Harry blew the whistle & out I shipped to that 11m bar with an 8mm pellet hair rigged at 12‘depth. I trickled in 6 pellets every 10 seconds & after only a couple of minutes the pole tip slammed under & pink drennan bungee poured out of my pole. I didn’t even see the bite as the fish hooked & bolted as they often do when hair-rigging on the pole.Good start, a couple of minutes later same thing & carp no 2 in the net Then a couple of minutes later & a 1lb roach went into the silver fish net. After an hour I had 8 carp, a roach, & a big skimmer for about 20lb. Awesome I was on target for my estimated 100lb. Now mark who was pegged next to me decided he was going to do the same….”if your giong to spray pellets all day, then it is pointless me fishing on the deck were his exact words”…he had a point. The difference was however our rigs, mark’s had a lot more finnesse about it & he was fishing a lot deeper, he also had a lily bed to his right & not a lot of room to manoeuvre next to it. After about another hour he to had caught a few carp & was catching me up.Now this is where the wheels almost fell of my day. You see I don’t know about you but when I am pegged next to anglers who are also fishing shallow as me then I tend to get a bit nervy & start overfeeding. If you are not careful you can get yourself into a bit of a race scenario with the feed & all to often the fish bugger off…..as they did in my swim. Now I faced a bit of a dilemma, I had about 30lb & was falling behind because I had started feeding to much, to often & the fish didn’t like it.I kicked myself, stopped what I was doing & went for a pee. Sort your bloody self out I told myself & concentrate on what YOU are doing. I went back out again. Only this time I cut my feed down to just 2 pellets every 10-15 seconds. After about half an hour bang the tip went under again & a carp was on, Phew. The remainder of the match saw me pull away from mark as I continued to put carp into the net. I had to ring the changes, changing depth & altering different sized hook pellets, but I kept to that strict feeding routine & managed to get the fish competing again. All in all It was a very good match for me, not only did I come third (with a little brown envelope) with 64lb, more importantly I also taught myself a lesson with the feeding & learned something in the process. On reflection it was a brave move to fish shallow, it was a bit of a gamble but it paid of as the fish were prepared to feed. Mark began to struggle with those lily pads halfway through, losing several fish & getting annoyed. He ended up with 30lb odd. The winner bagged over 100lb from noted flyer peg 21; he did fish it very well though & second was 80lb again from another flyer peg 12 all down the edge.Roll on next week, the owner has put £150.00 on the first person to bag 150lb……now if only I can draw that peg 19.