Fishy Fingerz Match

My peg at the final whistle.

Well, I did my first match in over 20 years with the Fishy Fingerz boys at Fishponds in Colwall. I didn't have the best luck in the world for various reasons, but can't grumble about my result. It was a good day out though which is all that matters at the end of the day.

My run of bad luck started with me smashing, and possibly breaking my little toe while getting my kit ready the night before, rendering me barely able to walk and worried I wouldn't be able to get a shoe on in the morning and would have to drop out. Thankfully that wasn't the case...

We arrived at 8am to be greeted by the owner with a cup of tea and a bacon butty for the bargain price of £2. I didn't catch his name but he seemed like a decent down to earth guy and offered some advice for those of us that had never been there before. Once everyone had arrived and been fed, the pegs were drawn. Naturally my name was picked last, so I was only left with 1 peg to "pick at random" from the bag, which was peg 21. We all hauled our gear around the lake to our pegs and got set up ready for the start at 10am.

As promised, I took my feeder rod that I'd won over 20 years earlier in the only other match I've ever entered, but I also took a float rod just in case I needed to get a bait higher up in the water. For baits, my main approach was going to be maggot to try and target the chub and ide which hopefully would build me up a good bag of fish, with a tin of hemp and a few pellets to maybe entice some of the lakes carp into my area. I guessed most people would go the maggot approach, so I decided to gamble on flavouring mine with some sonubaits tiger fish just to be a little different from everyone else.

The "secret sauce" for my maggots

When the clock struck 10, the "all in" call was made, and the match was underway! I'd decided to fish in a shady area under some trees on an island to my left, and on my 3rd or 4th cast about 15 minutes in my rod tip whacked round without any warning and I was into my first fish. After a short fight it was ready for the net, a nice chub of around 2lb. My run of bad luck had other thoughts though, so obviously as I was shipping the net out, the hook pulled. I rather comically threw my rod to the side and used 2 hands to try and scoop it with my net, but it was just a couple of inches too far and with a little "F**k you!" flick of its tail, it returned to the murky depths. Still, from what I could tell no-one else had even had a bite yet let alone a fish, so I wasn't too disheartened, if anything I was feeling more confident.

I kept recasting every 4 or 5 minutes for the first half hour to get some bait down on the deck, filling my small feeder with a 50/50 mix of maggots and hemp each time. Then my bad luck decided to strike again, and I managed to catch my finger on my tin of hemp while loading the feeder, which resulted in my hemp now becoming blood flavoured as a small stream of the red stuff trickled down my finger and into the tin from a rather deep cut. I had no choice but to reel in and go clean it up in the toilets and fashion a makeshift bandage out of toilet paper. I managed to get back to the lake just as the clock struck 11, at which point we all reeled in for a minutes silence for Remembrance Sunday to pay our respects to those that lost their lives to enable us to live ours the way we do.

The match resumed and it'd be fair to say everyone was struggling. By dinner time I'd managed to net 2 ide of about 12 oz, and I hadn't seen or heard anyone else catch anything! Early afternoon my spot seemed to dry up, I hadn't had even the slightest knock on the tip for 2 or 3 casts, and my neighbours had both had a couple of fish out each, so I switched to my second spot in the middle of the channel to my left, which I'd baited with some hemp and pellet at the start of the match. It didn't take long before the tip whacked round again, and I had a nice ide probably pushing 2lb to add to my tally. That was all the spot had to offer though, and by 1pm I decided to switch back to my first spot.

I was instantly getting indications, but just tiny taps on the tip, where as every bite I'd had so far had been a rod wrenching whack, so I figured that a shoal of small fish had moved in over the bait while the spot had rested. As things were slow going I decided to target them, after all a small fish is better than no fish. I set the feeder rod to one side and broke out the float rod, which I'd set up with the tiniest float I could get away with for targeting the ide if they came up in the water, but as luck would have it it'd be ideal for the small silvers too. First cast and the float didn't even settle before it was dragged under by a small roach of maybe 2oz tops, it looked like my thoughts about a shoal of small silvers moving in were correct...

They weren't! I gave it another 10 minutes, but didn't get even the slightest of twitches on the float. I gave it a further 10 minutes or so after, trickle feeding maggots 2 or 3 at a time, in the hope I could find some ide fishing on the drop like I did when I caught my first one during my quest for a big roach. It wasn't happening however, and time was running out. The guys closest to me had had a few more fish out each, and I knew I was lagging and needed to get a couple more in the net if I was to have a chance of winning. I spent the last hour and half back on the feeder and frustratingly missed a couple of big bites. They were so few and far between that it was impossible to keep up the concentration needed to hit the lightning fast takes. I did manage another fish about 15 minutes from the end, another ide of about half a pound, but as the end of the match was called I knew I hadn't done enough to win, but had I done enough to place in the top 6 and win a prize?

I was going to walk round and watch the weighing, as I knew roughly what I had in my net, but then bad luck #4 struck, and the heavens opened with a freak downpour of a mixture of rain and hail, so instead I tried (and failed) to get my kit packed up and out of the rain so it didn't all get soaked through. My bag was weighed last, and came in at 4lb, which was enough to land me 4th place! The winner was Steve with a whopping 8lb, who'd arranged the match (fix!) and had been one of my neighbours I was battling during the match, with my other neighbour coming 2nd with 7lb. My prize for 4th place was a free 48h on a local(ish) carp water kindly donated by one of the groups members, which really does look quite nice... But I don't drive, and thus can't get there unless I can blag a friend into paying full whack to come and join me, so I guess you could call my prize bad luck #5!

All in all it was a fun day despite breaking my foot and almost cutting my finger off, and would like to thank Steve for arranging it and the rest of the fishy fingerz boys who joined in. Hopefully I'll get the chance to have a rematch next year when the fish are a little more hungry and the gods aren't out to get me! I may have lost my 22 year old 100% match win record, but I do still have a 100% match placing record to maintain...