Saturday 10/08/2019 - Windmill Fishery - South Gloucestershire Show - Silvers Only - Match Lake

I've got mine, have you got yours? Well done Tom Scholey for organising it. Looking forward to it, but won't be chasing around the county to qualify.

The weather today was forecast to be horrendous with winds up to 55 mph. The Windmill Match Lake is notorious for its wind multiplication factor, so I checked with Dave Haines who confirmed the match would be still on. Wasn't sure I wanted to be there, but hate letting people down so off I went. Dave had a good few cry off so with only ten us there we had a debate on whether to fish or not. John Fuidge said the wind would stop with no rain - how wrong he was!! However, we decided to fish. I think what swung it was the decent payout.

Seen my first Cormorant this season. A bit early but might have been due to the awful weather. Heard that Paul Isaacs is to take over Bitterwell fishery, but don't know when.

Dave spread us out around the lake leaving out the bottom wind facing pegs. I was desperate to draw either pegs 24 or 25 which had the wind off the back. In to the draw bag (what's happened to the wooden draw box?) and out came peg 4. Not happy with this as it's not good for Silvers, but can throw up decent Carp weights! Bugger. At least I could park behind the peg.

I set up the short Ronnie rig to minimise the impact of the wind, and to be fair it was presenting OK. The only other rig was a 4x14 Winter Titan to fish top set plus one. By the time I had set up Carp were swirling in the margin - not what I wanted to see. I started on the Ronnie rig with single LR on the hook over GB laced with DR's, The upshot of this in the first hour I had just two small Ronnies and had hooked six Carp, with the sixth Carp fatally terminating the Ronnie rig taking the complete rig. So I spent the remaining five hours on the Titan with expander over Micro and in between hooking more Carp caught small Skimmers to 4 oz (nice to see them - hope they don't get commerantised). I later switched to maggot which the Carp liked more but did up the catch rate of minute Skimmers. The wind made things difficult especially the high gusts and the occasional heavy downpours.

I counted 15 decent Carp hooked (100 lb?). My few Skimmers weighed 11 lb 15 oz which to my surprise got my section by too many defaults to mention and got me halfway. I would have settled for this after drawing peg 4. The Lake actually fished well with plenty of Carp having a munch!

Most importantly I survived the weather conditions mostly intact.

The match was won by Shaun Townsend (pictured right with his catch) with 26 lb 7 oz of decent Skimmers from peg 6. Shaun caught on chopped worm over caster and chopped worm feed. Shaum fed about 1/4 kilo plus 2 pints of caster.

Result:

1. Shaun Townsend 26-07-0 peg 6
2. Dave Haines 22-08-0 peg 16
3. Bill Ferris 17-14-0 peg 8

Weigh Sheet: