Sunday 17/01/2010 - Queens Head Open - Boyd Valley Lake

Bela and I decided to forgo the Viaduct winter league for this year because of too many clashes with the Landsend Individual League for which we had already committed. The calshes are primarily due to cancellations because of the bad weather. Also, unless you can find a substitute, Landsend charge a no show pools fee of £25. This would have meant we could have been £75 out of pocket each – lesson learnt for next year we think. So I was expecting another Sunday home with the Special One. That was until I had a phone call from Martyn Rayet on Friday night asking if I wanted to fish an open down at Boyd Valley Lake. I told him it would be iced over. However, he guaranteed that it would all be thawed out by Sunday - "skating on thin ice" saying this! I disagreed with him him, but said I would go anyway. To be truthful I couldn’t wait to get back on the bank again for my first match of 2010.

“Luck favours the prepared” I arrived at the lake to find that – well see for yourself picture top left - told you so! However, I was the only angler with an ice breaker, and as luck would have it I was one of three anglers that drew an ice free swim!! But, Tim Ford made good use of it – Tim you need to put on some more weight to swing the breaker far enough.

I drew peg 4 which I was well pleased with. I set up the usual Ronnie rig and a Skimmer rig for 5 metres. I decide to fish positive, even though the weather was induicating otherwise. I decide to put three big cups of GB in at 5 metres and loose fed caster on the Ronnie line. I started after the Ronnie’s and started catching 1oz fish straight off. However, due to the lake being flat calm combined with bright sun light I was missing a lot of bites. I switched to maggot over caster which resulted in more bites but even more missed bites, so back on the caster and lucky enough the wind picked up giving the fish a bit of a canopy allowing me a good run of Ronnie’s up to 12oz. The wind died so I switched to the Skimmer line with 3mm pellet and caught a few Skimmers to 12oz. Unlike the Ronnie’s the Skimmers would not run with the bait so deciding on when to strike was arbitrary to some extent. The bites were much more positive when the float was towing or moving with the wingd - basically the float was pulling against the fish! Anyway, I managed to keep fish coming through out the match by switching between the two lines, topping up the 5 metre line with GB in between. I weighed 21lb 10oz of mainly Ronnie’s for first overall and my first pick up the year of £40 – were off!

Runner up was Mike Ferris (pictured right - courtesy of Roy Garland) - Bill’s brother) who caught 12lb 15oz of Skimmers to 1lb using pellet over micro pellet from peg 5. Mike caught all his fish at 10 metres.

Full Result:

1. Mike Nicholls 21-10-0 peg 4
2. Mike Ferris 12-15-0 peg 5
3. Tim Ford 9-07-0 peg 10
4. John Clark 8-06-0 peg 7
5. Leighton Palmer 7-13-0 peg 9
6. Shaun Townsend 7-12-0 peg 8