At least three of those are usually reliable so I can only assume that somebody, possibly me, had got their wires crossed somewhere along the line but to be fair out of a membership of nearly 40 you would have thought we would have had an half decent turnout at a popular venue like Trinity and with a good weather forecast too!
And not good for the fishery's income either but Misha did have the last laugh by leaving the otter fence switched on which thankfully, Mark Radford discovered before me!
This only reinforced my thinking that perhaps it's time I hung up my match secretary boots and let someone else have a go who can possibly inject a bit more enthusiasm into the club.
Anyway, enough of my whinging and back to the "match" (5 peg knock-up).
Plenty of room then so we spread ourselves out between pegs 6 and 15.
Ron Hardiman was in 6 which was where I would have liked to have been or maybe 8 which was occupied by Mark Radford.
I landed up in 11 but with this much room it didn't really matter much.
I had planned to have a nice easy day, nothing complicated and no 16m section coming out of the holdall.
So, I set up 2 shallow rigs for 14m (one was set for a foot deep and the other at about 3 feet which would double up as a margin rig).
I also set up a rig for on the deck at 6m where it was about 8 feet deep and fortunately this was the same rig from the last day at Holgan farm and was identical in depth within a couple of inches which was handy.
These rigs were all for 6mm hard pellet plus I set up a rig to fish dead maggot over groundbait which seems to be the fashion these days in the right margin between an overhanging bush and a small submerged branch.
The groundbait I had was actually some old green fishmeal method mix but it's all the same to me and I didn't expect the carp to be too fussy either.
At the start I fed a pot of 6mm's at 6m, which erupted into a mass of fizzing almost instantly, and went out on the deeper shallow rig with a 6mm in the band.
That only gave some little dinks on the float that I guessed were roach but after changing to the shallower rig I soon had my first fish which was an F1 (a new one for me at Trinity).
Not much followed on the shallow rig and I was itching to come over the short line which was still fizzing like crazy.
First drop in over that produced a small carp that was shaped like a football, followed by a foul-hooker that made it to the middle of the lake before the hook pulled.
The next fish was a slow-moving dead weight that obviously didn't realise I was trying to pull it out of the lake as, despite my best efforts, it was still milling around on the bottom amongst the feed but when it finally did wake up it cruised straight into the margin where I had plumbed up and transfered the hook into the previously mentioned branch which turned out to be quite a lot bigger than I originally thought, a small tree would be a better description and that was the end of that rig's short life.
So a new rig went on and the next fish tore off at a rate of knots and broke that one at the knot where I'd added a foot of line ... won't be doing that again!
Rig number three on and the next fish was a big bugger that was hooked in the tail and took me an age to get in. After much fretting, elastic pulling and platform leg trauma I eventually managed to get it in by hand-lining the elastic ... not something I would recommend but it did the job.
I wasn't the only one having problems though, Matt Taynton next door was having big problems with the undergrowth and seemed to be spending more time putting new rigs on than fishing.
So after all that commotion I gave the short line a rest and had another go on the shallow line but only got one fish off that.
Back on the 6m line and I had a "run" of 2 skimmers followed by odd carp, some hooked properly but I was loosing lots, probably mostly but not all foul-hooked.
Over to my left I got the impression that Ryan on peg 15 was putting a few fish together and Mr Taynton and myself were even Stevens.
I could hear lots of splashing coming from my right but I couldn't see down that end so I assumed both Ron and Mark were also doing well.
I'd had a look in the margins with four dead maggots on the hook but I had discovered a problem with this method.
It can be a bit problematic if your peg is solid with "eyes" and I reckoned that even if I had put 40 maggots on the hook I would have had the same problem.
Matt was doing something similar and was also getting "roached out" but he must have had better groundbait as he was snaring carp as well, including one that you could put a saddle on (his words) which was worrying.
As it turned out though my efforts had proved fruitful as Ryan weighed in 58-15 to Matt's 46-9 and my nets went 63-12 helped by a couple of late fish including my biggest fish which I had on the shallow rig over the 6m line.
Mark's paste attack let him down badly and Rocket Ron weighed in 56-5 so happy days but a close match and I had achieved my target of catching more today than I did over the three matches last weekend.
- Steve Burgess (11) ...... 63-12
- Ryan Radford (15) ...... 58-15
- Rocket Ron (6) ............ 56-5
- Matt Taynton (13) ....... 46-9
- Mark Radford (8) ........ 40-15
Finally, I won't be around for Sedges on Sunday as I'm going to Perranporth for the weekend so next week's thrilling installment will be brought to you by Chris Szakacs (if he turns up)!
