Silverfox Match Angling: Thursday 20/01/2022 - Bathampton AA - Winter Silver Series

Friday, 21 January 2022

Thursday 20/01/2022 - Bathampton AA - Winter Silver Series - Bridge Pool

Round two of the silver league. Hard frost and bright sunshine greeted us. Going to be tough day. Need a peg out of the sun or with some island shade me thinks.

Twenty four fishing today with two making up the numbers not in the paired up.

Into the draw bag and out comes peg 11. Not that happy as its tends to be more of and F1 peg than silvers. Plus the light during a winters sunny day is awful - pictured. The sun was to be out for most of the day and was worse for me for the most important first half on the match.

For company I had Hughie Evans on peg 10 who would suffer from the sun late on.

Pegs 10 and 11 is where the club stocked 1000 small F1's last week. Would it affect the silver fishing here?

Set up a 4 metre whip. Towards the island at about 13 metres was a nice dark shaded area where a yellow tip float would be perfect. Sadly however at the moment limited to four barrels. So a 4 x14 red tip Winter Titan was set up. I optimistically set up the yellow top waggler to reach the shade. The sun was so bad it was like casting blind fold, once cast and after shielding the eyes with the left hand I could just make out the float. I have to say my blind casting was spot on.

Started at top set plus three with the Titan with double Pinkie hook bait over GB with loose Pinkie feed. It wasn't long before I was playing a small F1. I had four on the trot plus one 4 lb Carp, alas no silvers. Having fed it a few times and had completely died. So Tried the blind waggler with single LR on the hook over loose fed LR's. My blind feeding was spot on too. I was anticipating catching some Ronnie's on this also, couldn't get a bite on it. The Ronnie's were not cashing bait today so waggler abandoned. Blanking on the silvers and with the sun moving over my first line I switched to four barrels at 10 o clock feeding micro and LR's. I had a couple of small Ronnie's and two 1 ln Skimmers - get out of jail. I had been loose feeding Pinkie on the 4 metre whip line so gave that a go and had a Ronnie and hooked a 12 ounce Ronnie and whilst between swinging or netting it, it came off - bugger - bad angling. With no more bites on the whip spent the rest of the match on the three barrels line catch the odd micro Ronnie with more falling off than entering the keep net.

My few silvers weighed 2 lb 12 oz for 4th in section. My few carp weighed 7 lb 12 oz. Luckily my partner Tony Ponting won his section so not a complete disaster.

For the second time the silvers was won by Tony Rixon (pictured right - same picture as last match as he didn't look any older and had the same clothes on) from peg 6 with 15 lb which was miles ahead of anyone else. Tony caught at 13 metres with maggot over GB laced with Pinkie and caster feeding about 1 kg of GB. Tony had some decent Skimmers in his catch pictured below.