This will be a short one as I’m all blogged out, Martin and Malcolm have been asking us to go down to Goodiford for ages so with nothing else on we had a knock up. There were only six of us and we decided to pay the top two and do a blind drawn pairs after the match. The lake looked nice and I managed to draw out end peg 27, I set up a rig for fishing three metres and a shallow rig. This was to be a silvers only match and Martin said weights should be good.
I had a small roach first chuck so switched to caster and started getting some better roach, I also had three nice tench and felt I was doing ok after the first hour. I was just ahead of Steve Parker on my right but was sure Martin would be catching on the next peg to Steve as he knows the venue well. I started to get the odd clonking big roach to 12oz but was bumping off loads of fish, I also lost a carp.
After a couple of hours Martin wandered down so maybe he wasn’t doing so well after all! Apparently Malcolm was catching well on the other end peg. I tried my shallow rig but it didn’t improve my catch rate so went back to the deep rig and catching the odd fish on the drop. Martin was getting the odd crucian on soft pellet so I kept trying it but could only catch roach. I finally caught a couple of crucians on double caster but no more tench. I gradually pulled away from Steve but thought I was behind Martin and Malcolm.
I ended with 144 fish but had no clue what weight I had because although I had some decent fish, I had a lot of smaller ones too. The weigh in started at Malcolm who fished peg 20 instead of 24 with the agreement of Rob and had 30lb 15oz and I was pretty sure I didn’t have that, Rob had 8lb 6oz, Graham Bulgin weighed 21lb 10oz and then Martin plonked 37lb 11oz on the scales and I knew I wouldn’t be framing today. Steve had 11lb 7oz and I weighed 23lb 14oz and was praying I’d draw Martin or Malcolm in the blind pairs.
The first two names out the hat were Rob and Malcolm to give them a combined total of 39lb 5oz, then Graham got called out with Steve (33lb 1oz) so me and Martin won the pairs with 61lb 9oz and picked up £15 each. The day got better still when Chelsea beat Arsenal 2-0 to stay top of the league.
1 – Martin Heard (Tiverton) – 37lb 11oz
2 – Malcolm Levy (Tiverton) – 30lb 15oz
Drawn pairs
1 – Martin Heard (Tiverton) and Jamie Rich (Against Men and Fish) – 61lb 9oz
Next week is the first match of the Crown league on the Isle and peg 27 would be nice!
