Sunday 14th November 2010

Good morning fisher people.

Apologies for the delayed update, computer problems.

What a lovely day for mid-November. Sun and no breeze to speak of for the majority of the match.
For once, we got the draw completed on time and didn’t have to give the frenchman an extra 15 minutes. Mind you, I think we should finish his match an hour earlier than everyone else to give him chance to pack up his kit on time.
14 competitors took part so we split the match into 2 sections again, 7 on the house bank and 7 on the wall.
I drew the wall, peg 11 again. The good thing about that was my rig was still set up from last week so plumbing the depth was over and done with in seconds. Again, fishing as near to exact depth as possible of 2 metres approximately, at about 8 metres. No other option but to go for the Tollostolob.
The only variation I tried this week was to set the waggler to a depth of about 11 feet and find that depth of water. That turned out to be at approximately 12 metres.
Groundbait on the pole line at the off and loose feed on the waggler line. I was hoping to pick up a few fish on the drop before the big guys moved in. I got bites but no fish.
I introduced a little groundbait on the waggler line and that started things going. Almost immediately there were bubbles in the peg and shortly after I hooked a tollostolob on the waggler. It stripped lots of line off the reel and surfaced about 80 metres away in front of me. I thought I’d beaten it when it turned and I began recovering line. Then the hook pulled out. Again, I assume it was foul hooked but it didn’t act like previously foul hooked fish. Never mind.

I switched to the pole line and had bites straight away. I had a grass carp, a sun perch and a taranka in quick succession. At least they were fish.
I hooked and landed the next tollostolob on 6 sections of pole. It just bounced around in front of me for a while, surfaced and I drew it to the net. It was hooked fair and square in the mouth on sweetcorn.
Luck played a part in the next 2 or 3 minutes. First of all bad luck when my landing net snapped, much to the amusement of Wooden Spoon John, the git. Then a bit of good luck when the fish didn’t bolt off with the net and I was able to scramble around and get it into the keep net.
I lost 3 or 4 more big fish, foul hooked and then landed the biggest tollostolob so far for me. 1 ounce short of 12lb. That was it, match over.

There were some nice fish caught on the house bank, in particular Nikolai’s on peg 6. He had an excellent bag of mainly grass carp in his winning weight. Again the house bank had fished most consistently with a number of double figure weights and good backing weights lower down the order. Personally, I much prefer that to waiting for the odd monster to turn up.

Results

Section A