This match was my first with a new Club, Breakingstone AC which have matches at a lot of the venue’s I fish and I know a few of the lads that fish in this club. This match as a newie I was made to feel very welcome. I enjoy club fishing where the banter and enjoyment is far more important to me that any cash gain. As a regular visitor to Hillview, I hoped to do well.

Both canals 1 and 2 were in for this match and I drew on peg 64 on the 2nd canal. On arrival at the peg the pallet looked like a Ski Slope. It was pointing upwards 45 degrees and not really save to sit on. I thought just what you need on your first match with a new club asking to move peg. But the lads were fine with it and I set up on the next peg, peg 63.

I planned a pellet match fishing a few pole lines short as I’m a regular at Hillview and I know this tactic works well and I started fishing a banded 6mm hard pellet on a 2+2 line. This was good for the first hour and I was catching small Carp, F1’s and the odd Silver fish. I knew if I kept on this line I would catch but I really needed to catch a better stamp of fish . So after an hour a turned to my left margin hoping the catch bigger fish.

So a started to fish micro’s and a soft 6mm Pro Expander hook bait in the left margin. I caught straight away and these were bigger fish. But the pellet attack wasn’t catching quick enough and on these canals at Hillview you need to catch all the time or you will just get left behind. I decided to swap to corn on the hook and feeding a few gains of corn with micro, every put in. This worked much better and I began to catch bigger fish faster. I had a good 3 hours here and I was now building a good weight. It was in Summer bagging mode now and I was thinking, would I have enough keepnets in? I’d filled 3 keepnets with Carp and F1’s and was thinking I was getting near to the net limits so I decided to throw away my silvers (less than a pound) and use this 4th keep net for carp and F1’s rather than walking back to the car for another keepnet.

Then the margin died on me. I couldn’t catch with around an hour left so I began to swap and change different lines with either hard or soft pellets. I did catch some more fish but I was swapping to different lines for the last hour.

Come the weigh in I had enough to win canal 2 with 119lb 10lb so in the money! and as the scales went around to canal 1. The end peg had caught some real lumps in his bag of fish and weighed in 143lb. So I was 2nd overall and a great start to fishing with Breakingstone AC.

Best Rig of the day

This was the margin rig where I actually fished a stronger rig that I normally use on the canals at Hillview. A rig I would tend to use on the big lakes at the venue. This was an inline 4×12 Preston Edge pole float set up on 0.19mm mainline with a small bulk of stotz’s above a cut down to 4 inches, Preston size 12 XSH (0.17mm) Ready Rig. With Preston red Dura Slip elastic (15) through a short one piece 1.8m Margin Power kit. I used 3 tins of Corn and 2 pints of Micro.