March 10th – Kingswood RBL AC Match, Feeder Canal – A Wet Bream Dream Comes True

Once again, I have 2 match reports to bring you, the first one being the Windmill Costcutter on Thursday 7^th March. So, this match has now been renamed the Costcutter 500… and why? Because it has now become a series of qualifying matches, culminating in a final sometime in October. The winner will pick up 500 notes, second will get 300, third will collect 200 and there are 3 further 100 quid prizes plus 100 nicker for top silvers, 80 spondulicks for second in the slivers and 50 squid for a section win. Whoopee! Bring it on! The new format has certainly peaked interest with 21 turning out for the first qualifier, instead of the usual 9 regulars. All you have to do to qualify is to win a Thursday match… easier than it sounds.

I didn’t mind where I was going to be today as it was anyone’s guess where the fish would show up. As it happens I drew peg 16, which was okay as I would have the wind off my back but would there be any fish out in front? The skimmers are showing signs of spawning so I reckoned they would be heading for the shallower water down the bottom end of the lake, around pegs 11 and 12. Not that I would be interested in skimmers today. You can’t win a match at Windmill with skimmers. So, my approach was to feed my 2 edge lines early with micros. To my left, I fed micros and soft pellet and to my right, I fed micros and corn. On my 8-metre line, out in front, I fed micros and meat and for the island, I would feed loose maggles, when I was ready to go out there.

From the all-in, I spent the first 40 minutes trying each of my 3 lines with no sign of a fish. So, on went my front pole roller setup. I fired out a pouchful of maggles close to the island and baited my rig with a single red. This rig consisted of 16 elastic, 0.22 (9lb BS) main line, a 0.15 (5lb BS) hooklength and a size 16 Guru Kaizen hook. I find that hooked maggles sit neatly in the dip of this hook and don’t ride up the bend. So, I’m now holding 16 metres of pole, and to be honest, I wouldn’t be able to fish this way for long without my trusty front pole roller. It takes the weight, holds the pole steady and allows me to ship in and out effortlessly.

Within a few minutes, I had an indication and then a few minutes later, I was playing a 10lb carp. It took an age to get in and when I did finally slip the net under it, I noticed it was hooked in the right pectoral fin. I wondered why it kept going around in circles… LOL. Well, with that one safely in the net so early in the match, I felt I was onto something as nobody else was catching as far as I could see. I carried on with this method, firing out a few more loose maggles and it wasn’t long before I was in again. This one was slightly smaller at around 9lbs. So, I now had close to 20lbs in the net with just an hour gone… hmmm… that meant if I could carry on like this, I could probably catch over 100lbs in 6 hours right? Wrong! In the whole of the second hour, I hooked and lost 2 more carp from the island and during the following 4 hours, I didn’t get a bite from anywhere.

My 2 carp weighed in at 19lb 7oz, to come nowhere. Having said that, I beat the 3 anglers to my right and the 4 anglers to my left, so not too shabby. The top 5 weights came from the top end of the lake with 75lb needed for a win and a couple of 65lb nets tying for second place. I’m really looking forward to the next one, where I’ll be trying out a new ‘secret’ bait. If you want to know how I get on… stay tuned.

Kingswood RBL AC Club Match – The Feeder Canal, Bristol

So, this club match was supposed to be on the river at Keynsham but on a mid-week inspection, the swims looked too dangerous due to a thick deposit of soft silt. One slip and you’d be sailing down the Swanny! With no time to book an alternative venue, we plumped for the Feeder Canal. Urban canal fishing is not everyone’s favourite pastime and so we were expectedly down on numbers. However, I don’t feel as though it was as bad as some might make out. You can virtually park behind your peg, you have a flat, safe bank to fish from, there’s plenty of room, and it has a depth of around 6-7 feet. There are no paddle boarders, virtually no boat traffic and walkers, cyclists and cars are well away from you. Okay, so the fish can be a little hard to find at times but then that can happen anywhere.

So, 7 of us lined the bank and every peg looked exactly the same in every respect. I drew peg 6 and had Steve Jefferies for company on my left and match secretary, Ian Brice, on my right. Now, I haven’t fished this canal in more than 12 years but when I used to fish here regularly, more than 20 years ago, I always used to fish bread and I’ve had some cracking roach catches. So, today I would have a 3-line approach. The first one was at 5 metres, where I would feed liquidised bread and fish a 5mm disc of punched bread over the top. Roach were the target species here. My other line was out at 12 metres, where I fed with balls of 50-50 Thatcher’s original and Dynamite brown crumb laced with dead red maggles and dead pinkles. My choice of hook bait for this swim was 3 live red maggles on a size 16 hook and the target fish was… bream. When the flow was slow, I would use the pole and when it speeded up, I fished an open-end feeder to the same area.

At times when the flow was quite fast, I would target the bleak and dace and so my third line was set at 6 metres, fishing 4 feet deep with a single pinkle for these little critters. I reckon if you just fished for them all day with a whip, you could probably bag around 5-6lb of them. Nobody seemed to be targeting them today, at least I didn’t see any whips in action, although I did hear some screams from the flats behind me… but that’s a very different story. So on the all-in, I cupped out some liquidised bread on the 5-metre line and plodded away with the bread punch. After about 25 minutes I hooked into a decent fish, which turned out to be a skimmer of around a pound and a half. I wasn’t expecting that… I was expecting roach on this line.

With an hour gone, I didn’t get any more bites on the short line so it was out onto the 12-metre line. I had already cupped out 3 big balls of groundbait at the start so hopefully the breamies would now be waiting. Well, I had a bite right away but missed it. It would be a good 15 minutes later before I had another, which turned out to be a dace. With the canal flow picking up pace, I put the pole down and picked up the feeder rod. I cast out close to where I had been feeding and within a few minutes, the tip slowly bent round. Don’t you just love it when you hook into a decent head-shaking bream? I carefully coaxed it towards my landing net and then realised I had put my small net on today. It was a real struggle to get the fish into my ‘canal net’, which caused a few heart-stopping moments.

I thought it was about 5lbs but it proved to be a bit lighter on the weigh-in at 4lb 5oz. After that, I changed up to a bigger landing net and carried on with the cage feeder. About 20 minutes later I hooked into another bream/skimmer, which was only about 2lbs. After that I had a liner that took the tip right round but alas, no more bream. The canal was running at quite a pace now so it was time to get the bleak rig out there. At 6 metres it was about 6.5 feet deep and my rig was set to about 4 feet. I had a size 20 hook to 0.11 hooklength on this rig, which I baited with a single pinkie. I fed a few loose pinkies at every run-through and by holding the rig back against the flow, it wasn’t long before I had a string of fish in the 1-ounce bracket. I probably lost nearly as many as I landed due to my self-imposed barbless hook policy. Well, I hadn’t seen much caught either side of me so I was quite sure I had done okay today.

At the weigh-in, I ended up with 8lb 4oz for a convincing win. Ian Brice to my right was second with 1lb 4oz and Steve to my left was third with 1lb 1oz. If you didn’t get a bream then you didn’t have a hope in Beelzebub’s drum today, and as very few roach were caught, other weights consisted of mainly bleak and dace. Well, it’s Windmill again for me next week but at the moment I’m not entirely sure where I’m going next Sunday… keep you posted.

If you enjoyed reading this blog then be sure to join the Fish Wag Facebook group HERE for blog updates. Please Like and Share… it’s appreciated! Check out my older blog posts below…