Thursday 26/09/2019 - Bathampton AA - Over 55's and Short Walks

Geoffs back so Hungry Horace for breakfast, which was particularly delicious. Geoff and I arrived in time for a walk around the Pool. The water looked clearer than last match with only signs of fish at the far end. I didn't expect it to fish well.

Tony Rixon told me he wouldn't be fishing Bridge Pool anymore because of brambles on peg 14 and poor maintenance. Well on my walk around a boat had been placed behind peg 14, but as expected no Tony with a couple of whores. What we need to bear in mind is that Bathampton is not a commercial fishery run by professional fishery owners, but run by its members, which you need to be to fish these matches, so it's up to the members to swim clear. Insidently one has been arranged for  5 th October at 07:30.

Matey Dave Gillard is currently undergoing test at hospital and with the other organiser away Steve Dawson ran the match with my assistance. On hindsight I don't think we got the pegging right leaving pegs 20, 19 and 18 out - one of these should have been used. However, we left Hard Hat peg 26 out replacing it with peg 25 which did fish reasonably well -  coming third. I was on peg recording duty so was left with the last peg in the bag. Peg 30, the same peg I won from last match, so was a little disappointed as I prefer to fish a variant of pegs.

Arrived at the peg and found myself next to the affable Ray  Bazeley on peg 29. The wind which was expected to increase was blowing in all directions but mainly into me at 11 o'clock. Same rigs and approach as last time so a bit boring. I fed all the lines and started on the Ronnie rig with single caster over GB with a few casters inserted. I started to get indications but no fish, which I put down to small Perch. I switched to single maggot and had a few Perch, Skimmers and Ronnie's. None of them bigger than 4 oz. Tried the long Skimmer line with worm over worm and caster and got pestered by small Perch, no signs of Skimmers. Back on the Ronnie line and had three better Skimmers and some more Perch and Ronnies. After an hour the swim appeared to fade, so thought I would have an early quick look on the paste line down the margin and had a Carp first try. So that was it, all the Silver rigs were retired. I had a good two hours catch decent Carp to 10 lb. The wind picked up which caused some foul hooking by dragging the rig back towards me and into the bank. The peg gradually faded but there were signs in the last 15 minutes that they had come back in numbers.

I finished the match with 5 lb  4 oz of Silvers and 119 lb 13 oz of Carp for a match winning total of 125 lb 1 oz. My biggest Carp went just over 10 lb. For some reason the Carp were really hard fighting today.

The Silvers was won by Paul Barnfield (pictured right with the match winner) with 16 lb 8 oz from peg 15. Paul caught on either maggot or worm over micro.

It was back to the pub with the usual suspects. A good laugh was had by all.

Result:

1. Mike Nicholls 125-01-0 peg 30
2. Paul Haines 54-02-0 peg 28
3. Gary Junior Bowden 29-08-0 peg 25

Silvers:

1. Paul Barnfield 16-08-0 peg 15
2. Steve Dawson 15-02-0 peg 27
3. Chris Ollis 14-0-0 peg 10

Weigh Sheets: