Gary's day

Today's match was a lake of 2 halves. Those of us over on the railway bank side were in T shirts but a cool wind had those on the less sheltered river side in coats.

Out of the draw bag came peg 3 which I was pretty happy with as the weed did not look too bad and I had a big lily bed to the right. But what to fish for: anything that swims or sit it out for tench. Anything that swims won so it was waggler to the more open water and a pole for near the lilies. It was a slow start broken up by Mark and John over on the far side having some pike bother - John got a small jack out later that decided it wanted to eat his feeder on the retrieve!

After an hour or so finally a few fish arrived but the bites were very delicate and the float needed to be dotted down. It was not quick with roach and a few small skimmers coming in 2s and 3s. By the midway point I seemed to be doing OK but then the odd tench started showing, although most made it to the safety of the weed. With an hour to go I had a small tench of about a 1lb and then really struggled for bites until the last 10 mins when the roach showed again. Typical!

It was going to be a close weigh in and I thought Jeff had the match won from peg 10 as it sounded like he had 3 tench. At the scales my mixed bag of small fish was enough to win with Jeff having just the 1 tench and not the 3 I thought he had.

1st Gary Pickard 6lbs 6oz, 2nd Mark Halverson 4lbs 13oz and 3rd Jeff Pearson 4lbs. Pic today is my Mr Crabtree looking peg 3 - Tony over on the far right.