Sunday 7th April 2013 Beacon View Fishery

Well last seasons blogging didn’t go too well, never seemed to have the time to get it written.

Going to try harder to make sure every match I fish this year is covered, so here is the first:

Sunday 7^th April 2013 Beacon View Fishery

The first Horwich Old Anglers match of the season was at Beacon View Fishery in Wigan, a fishery I had never fished before. The fishery is almost a tear shape and we fished the wide end.

I managed to find out a bit of info before hand, mainly it’s very deep, stuffed with skimmers and some big carp. Also the fish like to come shallow.

Arriving at the fishery I felt very under prepared as I had just got married and been on honeymoon so had no time to sort rigs and get my kit in order that coupled with the very cold weather I wasn’t overly confident.

I drew peg 9 which was basically an open water peg with a bit of room (as most were). I decided on fishing two pole lines at 13 metres.

First line was straight in front of me and I set up two rigs. First rig was on the deck around 9 foot and the second was a shallow rig of around 4-5 foot. This line was a catch all line and the plan was to simply use maggots firing 8-10 maggots every minute.

The second line was at about 2 o clock, again to be fished on the deck. The plan for this line was to target skimmers. I decided to feed a orange sized ball of groundbait with a few maggots pellets and grains of corn mixed in and fish the different offerings on the hook to see what the fish wanted.

For the rigs I used a 1 gram Diawa Tipo float 0.15 main and 0.12 hook length with a size 16 B911 hook. The shallow rig was the same lines and hook with a 0.5g Chianti style float

I also set up a banjo feeder and a pellet waggler rod as alternatives to enable me to rest my pole lines.

As per usual the all in I was not ready as it took me forever to get the depth on my lines and had to use two different rigs. So five minutes or so later I was finally ready. I started off my priming my groundbait line before starting on the maggot line.

I decided t start on the shallow rig as I had been told more often than not someone will catch a fish shallow straight away whilst everyone else is on the deck and it won’t start fishing for at least an hour.

After half an hour shallow without a touch I went onto the deck and another hour hour later still biteless I decided to change to my groundbait line. I topped this up with a small nugget of gb and started on a 4mm Ringers Expander. I gave this line half an hour and again no bites, I tried pellet corn and maggot with no joy. Looking around the lake and it didn’t seem anyone was catching.

I decided to go back on the maggot line which I had continued feeding every minute. Before doing so I again topped up the gb line with a small nugget. First put in on the maggot line and a line little dip on the float resulted in my first skimmer of the day, around 6-8oz. I went back out expecting a few more bites but nothing materialised.

For the next couple of hours I rotated lines and gave the feeder and waggler a chuck but nothing seemed to work.

With about an hour and half to go I finally had another bite and land two more skimmers in quick succession. However I went and wrecked the good work because the next bite I managed to drop my pole when striking and the fish came off and I couldn’t get another bite.

I went back to rotating swims and without about an hour to go I got an almighty stroke of luck. On my maggot line I was shipping back to change bait and rotate swims when all of a sudden elastic came streaming out of my pole and a fish went charging into the next peg. I was only on 11 hollow elastic and after about 15 minutes I managed to land a nearly 8lb mirror carp which had been foul hooked.

After sorting out the mess of my rig it had caused I went back on the maggot line and immediately hooked another carp. After a shorter battle I went to scoop the fish but as i did it dived under my landing net and managed to snap my line on the handle.

After that I got no more bites but was confident with my foul hooked carp I must have been close to a win as I hadn’t seen anyone else catch a carp, only a handful of skimmers.

The scales came round and I weighed 9lb 8oz which was good enough for second place.  Dave Dermot won with around 15lb I think after catching a couple of carp late on.

Mixed emotions at the end because I was happy that I had snatched a frame from jaws of defeat but gutted I didn’t land the second carp as it may have made the weigh very interesting.

Over all apart from taking far too long to get ready I thought I fished OK. I made some silly mistakes which can be easily rectified with a bit of concentration. But I don’t actually know what more I could have done. On the day the fish clearly were not for feeding and a lucky carp got me a few quid.

Roll on the next match at Cunneries!