Sunday 11th March - Manor farm open

With warmer weather and a good turnout of 21 anglers it was set to be a good match. 

Island. Middle and Ash pools were all in the bag and I fancied drawing on ash. 

Peg 18 stuck to my hand, it's a good peg on the far side of Ash pool but your set back from 20 and if the fish are in the middle of the lake, 20 normally dominates it. 

After walking all my kit round to my peg as didn't want to get stuck in the mud I had already made my approach. 

I was fishing to win the match like I always do and in order to do so I was going to fish quite positively. 

With the water temperature above 10 degrees the fish were and wanted to feed shallow. 

I set up: 

A profiessional 25 Colmic waggler rod, coupled with a Zartan reel, 0.20 main line to an 0.152 Spider hook length. Size 16 B911 X-strong. 5gram drennan waggler. 

14.5m pellet line, 

Top kit plus 3 - short line as a banker. 

And 3 shallow rigs. 

The perfect match would be start on the waggler, catch a few, build up my pole line, then catch shallow on the pole....

And that's a little bit like how my match went. 

I began fishing at around 25m on the waggler firing 6mms around my float set 3ft deep. After a while of building it up I caught reasonably well and the first hour had gone and I'd got 7 F1s, all the while I had been pinging my pole line and was itching to drop on it. A quick look on the deck only saw me catch skimmers so back on the waggler for a few more. 

The waggler line faded and I was adament I'd catch on the pole. A short while of perfecting my rig, feeding and presentation I was soon catching shallow. 

At around 1:30 I probably had around 70lb and the wind was starting to pick up slightly giving me a nice ripple which is just what I needed, this gave the fish confidence and the shallow line, for an hour became solid! 

With an hour to go I was hoping it would get stronger but it faded slightly, so I pushed out to 16m and began catching again it they were noticibley smaller. 

The hooter sounded and the match was over, I roughly counted I had over 50 F1s and 2 Carp. 

My fish weighed 150-2-0 which won the match! 

Best rig was a Map SF2 to 0.152 Colmic F1 spider mainline to and 0.11 hook length. 

I fed around a pint of 4mms on my shallow line and half a pint on the waggler. 

Really enjoyed the day and learnt a fair bit to hopefully leave me in good stead for the summer!