Thursday 1 September 2011

Thursday - 01/09/2011 - Bathampton AA Over 55's And Disabled - Bridge Pool

The 1st September and what a glorious morning, perfect weather, lets hope it’s also the start of an Indian summer.

For some reason I thought we were on Withy Pool today, so I was delighted to find that we were in fact on Bridge Pool.

After the usual reading of the riot act on the does and don’ts by Mike Jones and Chris Rolfe it was into the draw tub. Wonderful out comes peg 16, another of my favourite pegs for both Skimmers and Carp. As I was setting up Bob Price arrives on peg 17 and said that he would give me a “pasteing” today on Carp. So the gauntlet was down and a £1 bet in place. I set up three rigs – a 4x16 Jolly for down the track for the skimmers, a margin paste rig and finally a Ronnie rig, which, because of the stiffness in my hands was discarded after a couple of small fish. I pot fed the Skimmer line with a few hard 4’s and fished a 6 mm expander over the top and started to catch Skimmers up to 4oz regularly with the odd 1 ½ pounder. However, the Skimmers kept disappearing so I experimented with the feed and found that feeding five grains by hand rather toss potting was a bit more productive. I kept going on this line until mid match when I hooked a Carp in the chin. Bob Price had already caught four Carp so I made the decision to now go for them. I had been carefully and regularly feeding hard 4’s into the LH margin and was rewarded first put in with the paste with a 10lb Carp. I caught Carp steady up to the last twenty minutes when a Carp went under the margin tree I needed to pull hard but what I didn’t realise I had lost the Carp and was trying to pull the tree out by it’s roots! Even my power top set wasn’t up to this and there was an almighty bang and my top four became a top eight (see picture upper right)!! Everyone on the Lake heard it, so at least my favourite top set went out in grand stile, and to everyone’s amusement (I got all the 28 names including the ring leader – Mike Jones – I get you all back). So I set up again and added another two Carp to my sixteen before for the “all out”.

My eighteen Carp weighed in at 161lb 11oz and my half time Silvers went 14lb 4oz for a winning total of 175lb 15oz. My Silvers was good enough for fourth in the Silver pool.

So let that be a lesson to you Mister Price. I reckon he should have paid me £2 as I doubled his weight plus I gave him a four fish head start.

The Silvers was won by team mate Rich Coles (pictured right with the overall winner) with 16lb 15oz of Skimmers from peg 30. Rich fished expander pellet over damped micro and 4’s.

I must say it’s nice to see that Bridge Lake has now fully recovered. This is bourne out by the fact that in my last five matches I have caught 734 lb of fish!

I am now looking forward to the winter Silvers league. I understand that club Secretary Dave Crookes is thinking of fishing the league - lets hope he does.

Full Result:

1. Mike Nicholls 175-15-0 peg 16
2. Bob Price 84-06-0 peg 17
3. Alan Jones 62-13-0 peg 32
4. Mike Jones 44-09-0 peg 31
5. Paul Haines 38-01-0 peg 24
6. Andy Shields 37-10-0 peg 5

Top Silvers:

1. Rich Coles 16-15-0 peg 30
2. Paul Haines 15-09=0 peg 24
3. Alan Jones 15-04-0 peg 32
4. Mike Nicholls 14-04-0 peg 16

2 comments:

Mike Jones said...

repluniTop marks for honesty, if I had been stupid enough to break mine on a tree I would have kept it quiet!
Just to recall the incident, there was a deathly crack, it all went earily quiet, then it filtered out around the lake what had happened and 28 people all burst into laughter at the same time. He he.
Iook forward to some of the other bloggers comments!

Mike Jones said...

Sorry Mike, slight mistake in the last comment. It was 27 members laughing, but their laughter was drowned out by the 28th crying!