PARTRIDGE LAKES OPEN MATCH COVEY 17TH FEB 2013
After having had a pretty hectic week i was looking forward to a nice relaxing day catching a few f1s but how wrong was I .
When packing my gear into the car I noticed a thick frost on it and with clear sky’s and a strong wind forecast , presumed the fishing would be hard especially when driving past the canal I noticed it was frozen for the first time in weeks .
On arrival at partridge at 815 the car park was busy as usual so I signed up and went for a buttie , still haven’t got the hang of the draw yet because both weeks have been in the bottom six to pick .
My home for the day was peg twenty on covey lake one and upon finding my way to it found it was exactly opposite from last weeks peg and the one were he had caught on sweetcorn .
My peg looked nice with it being 11m wide with some rushes to aim at and a long straight margin to my left at least 16m long , the guy to my right had come all the way from Bradford and fishes it every week he informed me that my peg was a good summer peg which throws up some big carp in the margins , but im not sure it would be affective today .
Decided to set up the same rigs as last week ; 3ft , 4ft and 5ft my 4ft rig would also work for the margin to .
My bait table had all the usual ;
pint maggots
soaked micros
crushed expander sloppy
sweetcorn
4mm expander
red jpzs
After plumbing up to find the correct areas to fish , I checked to see how my float settled and it flied under and I was latched into a foul hooked 1lb f1 , most people see this as a good sign of the peg being black with fish but in my limited experience I have found it to be the opposite .
My section didn’t look that hard but you can never be sure with the calibre of angler on here , on peg seven next door to the one I had fished last week was an angler I had seen a lot of in the fishing magazines so took a keen interest to see how he got on .
The all in today was at 1015 I cupped in a half cup of maggots micros and sweetcorn 11m down my left margin and another of maggots on my 5ft channel swim and these would be left alone for at least an hour , I went straight out to my 3ft deep rig concentrating mainly on maggots this week because I had the most success using them the week before , noticed that the wind was getting increasingly stronger from right to left and it could turn problematic later on in the session .
I worked all along the far bank at this depth without any sort of indication so I tried my 4ft rig and hour two went past and still nothing , resorted to my 5ft channel rig and had a small ide which took my bait on the drop to avoid the blank .
The angler on peg seven was catching constantly and the angler on peg four was putting a run of fish together from the wind ward margin but apart from that no one was catching much .
In the fourth hour the wind was far to strong to present a good bait along the far bank so gave that line up as a bad job and concentrated on my near slope and mid channel with out any success .
At the all out I had the solitary ide and the guy to my right had only three carp so not a good day and not really sure why !! it could have been because I over fed thinking I was targeting 25lb+ of f1s which weren’t present in my peg and I couldn’t present a bait along the far bank were it has become apparent that’s the place to fish .
The guy on peg seven had 34lb for the section and my section was won from peg twelve with 13lb but he had the wind off his back . I will put up the results later but think 50lb won and 40lb second from covey three .
What i learned today;
far bank is the place to be on here and maybe over fed in the conditions because found out after the match it was froze over on the sat .
Cant wait for next week and hopefully get on covey three in better weather conditions .
matthews580 