Landsend 25 May / Shiplate 01 June

They say that you can wait ages for a bus and then two turn up together, well in this case it's three but to save Darren North's internet data allowance I'm going to condense the first two posts into one and save the best one for tomorrow!

Landsend, Match & Speci Lakes, 24 May (24 pegs)

24 booked into this one which was our best turnout of the year so far and, no doubt must have been like Christmas-come-early at the Duckett mansion.

As a result we had two sections on Match Lake and a section on the back side of Speci.

The weather was good, warm and sunny with a gentle breeze (ideal), and even though the results from the Saturday open weren't encouraging most were expecting a decent match.

It turned out to be a bit of a struggle on Match Lake and the section on Speci fished a whole lot better.

Winner on the day and riding on his success drawing ability from the previous match at Trinity was Lee Williams on peg 32 (his first match on the Specimen lake and I suspect not his last) with 108-8

Fortunately for Lee he had John Bradford next door in 31 which is always good news as he is allergic to anything over a pound in weight but he did hang around long enough to win the silvers with a pitiful 17-9.

You can read all the gory details of Lee's match here as he does a much more professional job of this nonsense than I do!

Mark Radford was 2nd with 91-11 from peg 30, making the most of the fish that turned left instead of right out of the Gimp's peg!

The best of the rest was Brian corner-peg Shanks with a late charge from peg 1 on Match Lake that gave him 82-10 which was just enough to fend off Steve O' Toole's 73-9 from peg 5 and Ryan Radford who weighed in 72-14 from peg 3.

As for me, I had a next-peg battle on Speci with with Will Dearlove which I lost by 2lbs-ish but I managed to scrape 2nd in the section thanks to a couple of defaults, and a pound coin off of Alan Healey which went straight into Lee's Holiday fund.

1. Lee Williams (peg 32) ........ 108-8
2. Mark Radford (30) ........... 91-11
3. Brian corner-peg Shanks (1) ............. 82-10
4. Steve tonsilitis O' Toole (5) ....... 73-9
5. Ryan thanks Grandad Radford (3) ... 72-14
6. Will munter-hunter Dearlove (26) ... 55-12
7. Steve Burgess (25) ....... 55-5
8. Darren 100mb North (16) ..... 50-8
9. Chris silvers Szakacs (11) .... 42-3 
10. Matt Taynton (9) ........... 40-4
11. Not-so Rocket Ron (19) ..... 31-8
12. Simon Belcham (15) ......... 29-10
13. Adam Caswell (28) ........... 26-4
14. Rich Jones (22) ................ 26-3
15. Alan Healey (24) .............. 26-0
16. Mike Welling (7) ............... 20-2
17. John Bradford (31) ........... 17-9
18. Pete Uzzell (21) ............... 17-4

and 6 dnw's

Silvers:

1. John Bradford .... 17-9
2. Chris Szakacs .... 16-0
3. Rocket Ron ..... 9-0
4. Simon Belcham .... 8-0

Shiplate, Hawthorns, 01 June (11 pegs)

After hitting the dizzy heights of 24 fishing at Landsend it was back to reality  this week with a turnout of 11 on Hawthorn's Lake at Shiplate Farm Fishery.

Again the weather conditions were excellent but again the fishing was a bit "iffy".

I drew peg 3 which is apparently a "feast or famine" peg but unfortunately for me Brian Shanks was on 1 with nobody in between us.

My mission for the day, if I chose to accept it, was to intercept any fish that were heading into peg 1 from the rest of the lake.

For whatever reason I chose to ignore that mission and instead pissed about for six hours getting nowhere slowly and feeding two pints of casters down the edge for no apparent reason!

The highlight of my day was the large breakfast at Shipham Cafe which I almost (but not quite) managed to consume and the company of a huge family of newly hatched ducks that had not yet developed a fear of bait bags  or anything else for that matter!

To cut a long story short, Brian had a thoroughly enjoyable day's pleasure fishing in peg 1, easily winning the match by plopping and slapping an 8mm pellet shallow all around his peg and ending up with 105-9 for an easy win.

He did have a 30 minute spell when everything went wrong which happened to coincide with the 30 minutes that I was sat behind him with the camera.

I did contemplate making a space amonst the goose shit to have a siesta on tghe grass but "one more chuck' syndrome got the better of me and my solitary carp of ?? went back early which I would have done too if  the results board and weigh-gear weren't under my control (the joys of being match secretary)!

1. Brian Shanks (peg 1) ....... 105-9
2. Mark Radford (9) ........... 78-9
3. Adam Caswell (6) .......... 54-7
4. Rocket Ron Hardiman (10) ...... 53-10
5. Chris Gay (4) ........ 41-10
6. Matt Taynton (14) ..... 35-1
7. Ryqan Radforsd (15) .... 33-4
8. Alan Healey (7) .......... 25-12
9. Lee Williams (11) ........ 21-2

and 2 dnw's (including myself)

To ease the pain somewhat I fished the  following Thursday evening knock-up back at Landsend where I drew peg 7 (photo at the top of this post) and managed second with 60-ish lbs.