With the weather forecast not looking good for Sunday I choose the Saturday for this weeks fishing fix. Hillview normally use the big lakes on a Saturday and I fancied it this week. It fished really hard for all which made this an interesting match where a bit of extra thinking was required to get some bites.

The draw put me on peg 28. I peg that doesn’t go in often as there is a really large bush right near the pallet so ruling out the left margin completely and then to add to my frustration I had an angler on the next peg to my right. So I had limited options with the margins where normally you can do a big weight at this time of year. So my match would be out into the pool today.

Plumbing up it was really shallow , only 4 foot from bank to the middle of the pool and it was flat calm with no ripple on the water. I guessed it was going to be a tough match, and so it proved.

It started the match on hard pellets on a short 2+2 line and caught a couple of F1’s and a few small Tench and Skimmers in the first half an hour and all looked good for a nice days fishing but the bites soon dried up and no one on the pool was catching much. I began moving around the peg just tapping in a few pellets here and there but nothing was happening. The F1’s weren’t feeding so I tried for carp on meat on a short line extra early. I did actually catch a carp on the meat but that was it. So the next hour I was just scratching around trying to catch anything alternating between my F1 rigs and my carp line.

I thought to myself this match is going to be all about the last golden hour in the margins and I didn’t have a decent one to fish into. So I began to fish a short top kit plus one line with micro’s and a hard 6mm pellet on the hook by the side of my left keep net and going into the last hour I finally began to catch a few fish. It wasn’t prolific but at least I was now catching some fish. I needed to catch more and as this was the last hour I needed to catch quickly. So when I hadn’t had a bite on the short top kit line I rested it and fished the meat line. If that didn’t work after a few minutes, then back to the other line. Then the meat line was getting the stronger adding several carp and F1’s in the last 15 minutes before the end of the match.

It was as I thought, all on the last hour today, everybody had struggled and my fish weighed in at 53lb 9oz. A very low weight for Hillview’s standards but it was enough to win the section and actually was 3rd overall.

Best Rig of the day

This was the meat line. which was a 4×12 Preston inline Diamond pole float in 4 foot of water, tied up on 0.19mm mainline with a bulk of stotz 12 inches from the hook and a dropper shot 6 inches above a size 14 6 inch Preston XSH Ready Rig. Set up on Preston 13 Dura Slip. Bait and feed was 8mm cubes of meat.