The semi final was now only two weeks away and this third and final practice match would be the last chance for all competing teams to practice the match length as the venue would be closed up until match day. This is an excellent idea as it should guarantee a good semi without the fish having been hammered.
Conditions for this match had been forecast as appalling.The forecast had predicted temperatures down to -7 or -8 for the Pewsey area on Saturday night, obviously this is not conducive to bumper canal weights. For once the forecast appeared to be correct as the temperature gauge on Danny's car confirmed. We weren't going to be caught out without ice breakers for this match though and we both expected to use them too. I was worried that we weren't really going to learn much from this match as I couldn't envisage temperatures of -7 on the day of the semi.
Again my aim from this match was to fish a different area of the canal from the other two matches and my draw of permanent peg 148 put me 13 pegs away from my peg in the first match. This put me on the straight leading up to Wilcott Bridge and gave me the luxury of a walk of about 5 yards to my peg. The only thing I didn't like about this was every other angler in the section had to walk past my peg to get to theirs, meaning lots of commotion! The area hadn't fished brilliantly in the previous match, but the match organiser reckoned I had a chance of skimmers, however I was sceptical they would feed in the arctic conditions.
Bait for the Day
1.1 pints of joker
some small English bloodworm
liquidised bread
a few pinkies and maggot
1/2 pint castor
a few lobs.
As I arrived at my peg my suspicions of a frozen canal were confirmed and despite attempts to clear the peg with my ice breaking pole the ice was to thick. Therefore, out went the ice breaker and I soon had a nice clear peg, however I really wanted to avoid doing this with the possibility of skimmers in mind. I had drawn in between Darren Cox and my team mate Simon Drew, interestingly Darren's peg was unfrozen, whilst Simon's seemed to be thicker than mine and he had a real job clearing it. On these sort of days you fear a boat going through and smashing the ice into a million pieces, causing mayhem for everyone.
Shock, Horror
My day suddenly took an almighty turn for the worse. I decided I would phone Danny to see what his peg looked like so reached for my mobile in my bag. My hand went into the side pocket and there was nothing there, I checked my pockets, my entire bag and couldn't find my phone and more importantly my wallet! I retraced my steps in my mind and it soon became apparent what had happened. When Danny dropped me off he was keen to get going to his peg and as I unloaded my gear I put my phone and wallet on top of his car. Obviously he had driven off and my phone and wallet were now AWOL in the Pewsey area. I borrowed my mate Dean Tennant's phone who was a few pegs up the canal and called Danny, hoping he had somehow got them. He had not seen them though and I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. Despite walking about half a mile up the road looking amongst the vegetation I found nothing. I had no choice now but to phone to get my cards and mobile cancelled. What an idiot I had been and its not the first time I had done it, once I done the same thing before a canal match at West Drayton, luckily when i realised 10 minutes later, phone and wallet were still there. I was not so lucky on this occasion though. My only hope was that an angler had found them and would hand them in at the end of the day.
As you can imagine I was not exactly in the correct frame of mind to fish an important match and take on an England international on the next peg. I now only had about half an hour remaining to get set up and wouldn't be able to set up as many rigs as I would like to. To make things worse more ice had drifted into my peg when I was away and five minutes before the start I had to chuck the ice breaker in again! Things were not going well to say the least!
I fed my normal positive lines as in the previous two matches and started on the bread but a bite less fifteen minutes confirmed it was going to be a hard day. Therefore, I plumbed up 4 more lines, 2 were in 2.5 feet of water up the far shelf and the other two were down the middle in deep water. In the deep water lines I fed 2 balls of soil with a pinch of joker in to try and catch some perch. In the 2.5 feet lines I fed two "nuggets" of raw jokers, in the hope of catching anything and getting a few bites.
Darren next door had also been bite less on the bread, but had caught a few small roach by going right over and catching in the shallow water on joker. Simon Drew next door to me was bite less but seemed to have other things on his mind judging by the "Bifta" hanging from his mouth! On my deep soil lines I managed to get a few bites from tiny perch and gudgeon, but these fish were 100 to the pound size and I was going no where with these.
Suddenly I had a change of luck and I struck into something on double joker which was clearly going to be a very handy bonus on the day if I got it out. The fish tore off down the canal very quickly and my initial thoughts were that it was a tench. At this point I felt I was in serious trouble as I remembered my terminal tackle consisted of an 0.06 bottom to a 26 IM1 and a number 2 elastic, clearly this was not "barney stopping" gear. I had the extra problem of ice preventing me following the fish down the peg all I could do was dip my pole tip and hold on. After a couple of minutes it became obvious nothing was moving and the fish had snagged me. my only option was to increase the pressure and pull back towards me. Amazingly the fish came back towards me, but snagged itself again in front of me. This time I tried giving it some slack line to see if it would swim out, however it didn't work and again I had to increase the pressure. Again the fish came free from the snag, but snagged me a third time at about 4 metres. This time I put as much pressure as I dared on the fish and something started moving slowly towards me and as a tree branch appeared above the water and I thought the fish had gone. Alas no, lady luck was obviously on my side as I spotted a fish about a foot below the branch in the clear water, a quick scoop of the net and I had a pound perch in the net. It was absolutely amazing I had managed to land this fish, as I am convinced 99 times out of a 100 it would have broken me! My IM1 hook was badly bent and could only have been just been hanging on in there.
After changing the hook it was back to the very odd small perch down the middle on double joker. I soon had to rest these middle lines and a switch to the shallow lines with double and single joker bought me the occasional roach. These were bigger than the roach at about half an ounce. I even netted a 2 ouncer which was a real treat on the day. The story for the rest of the match was scratching on all four negative lines and occasionally picking up odd fish from each which were no bigger than half an ounce. However, in the the final fifteen minutes I managed to pick up three 2 ounce perch over my initial positive deep joker line, which were a bonus on the day.
It had been a real struggle and the match had been ruined by the savagely cold weather and also by the fact I had lost my major personal belongings! At least the lucky perch was some sort of recompense. I weighed in 2lb 2 ounces which was enough to clinch my 5 peg section, my catch consisted of the pound perch and a pound odd of eyeballs. Darren weighed in 1 pound dead which was all bits and bobs, whilst Simon next to me tipped back a couple of ounces. Back at the pub no one had handed in my phone or wallet, so my last ray of hope had gone. The match was won by Starlets Mick Dagnall with 14lb odd of big skimmers, interestingly 5 anglers in a row had caught these fish and made up most of the frame. I couldn't believe they had fed in these conditions. As in previous matches we had 4 or 5 section winners and we felt that we had been getting to grips to the canals different moods. We all knew this would count for nothing if we didn't get it right on the big day.
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