Gary's day

First off a big thank you to Tony for sorting out the Sunday Club matches over the season .

Today was the last match of the 2022/23 season which saw us at a very wet Hall Farm. As I was guesting today as match organizer peg 8 was definitely not in the draw bag. I have had that peg way too many times this year. Of course I drew peg 7, out came the spare top 3 again as these pegs are 10ft+ at 5 sections.

Whilst setting up there were a few fish topping but Phil on 6 and I knew we wanted to be at either end of the lake. A slow start on cage and maggot feeder whilst feeding the pole line let me know the roach and rudd had woken up, lots of bites but at 1oz a fish I was going nowhere. On the pole it was the same issue, a bite a chuck but tiny fish. Maggots were the wrong choice.

Trying shallow finally produced a F1 around 12 but then it was back to bits. At this stage John wandered past whilst going to his car and mentioned he was struggling with just (!!) the 4 carp on end peg 12. We had also been seeing Mark hooking a few fish so Phil and I knew we were not doing well. Thankfully the rain stopped around 1pm and I started to warm up a bit - it was getting pretty chilly. With 2 hours to go I decided I had nothing to lose so I dug out a 2 gramme rig from the bottom of the box and upped the feed rate. The plan being to bomb the bait to the bottom for bigger fish and feed off the small stuff. Well it worked for about 3 drop ins until the tiny fish learned they needed to be quicker. Amongst the small fish there were a bigger few and I ended up with some roach and rudd up to the 10-12oz mark - a good sign for the future. With 15 mins to go I decided to give shallow one more go and, you guessed it, the F1s had rocked up. 3 fish before the end was much too little and too late.

I ended up with just over 19lbs with the silvers adding more weight than I thought to the 4 F1s. The end pegs though dominated with John an easy winner but with Mark ruing a lot of lost fish with needing to try and stop them charging through the reeds in peg 1. 1st John Todd 47lbs 12oz, 2nd Mark Halverson 27lbs 8oz and 3rd Gary Pickard 19lbs 3oz.

Sorry no pictures today - my phone was buried under so many layers to keep it dry I completely forgot to take any.