Fish O mania

• 2nd overall
• 118lb
• Canal, Peg 4
• Chop worm and caster
• Mainly F1′s and Barbel

Fish O maina

Fish O mania is without doubt is one of the most prestige matches to win, especially with a whopping £30,000 winner takes all final!  I have been in the final once before, which was many moons ago back in 2001, which I came second from last.  Last year (2010) was the first time I got some tickets (two) in nine years and I was 4^th at Larford, and lost more than enough fish to win.

Tunnel Barn Farm.

This is a venue where I do struggle with as I am very aggressive angler, I don’t mean that I need anger management classes as I am very calm, I tend to feed heavy and fish to win, so aggressive in fishing means positive.  The issue with been too positive you can blow your chances, as feeding too much bait can be fatal, and a venue like this is where people feed very little especially in winter.  Tunnel has several lakes, and without doubt is full of fish, especially F1’s, there are lot of other fish like: roach, rudd, golden rudd, bream, mirror carp, common carp, Barbel, chub, gold fish, perch, tench,  so when the float goes under you don’t know what it is going to be.  A lot the lakes, are snake lakes, or have islands so there is features on most pegs.

Information, on the phone

I haven’t fished tunnel for over a year, but I know that Bread was winning a lot of the matches, but this is something I have never done, so I wasn’t going to try now.  I had been on the phone to Kevin Fowell (aka Dad) to give me some advice, but he is a caster man and is very good at it, something that I need to learn off him.  So there were two methods that I wasn’t going to do, as you always want to fish to your strengths……  He told me that paste had been winning, this is a method that I love, but when I fish it, it normally involves me feeding 6 pints pellet, sometimes more!  Now if I feed this style at Tunnel, I would catch nothing.  Paste fishing here is a much more negative approach and normally involved feeding less than half pint of pellet, and letting the paste (your hook bait) feed the swim.  This sounded good to me, but worms and casters was always going to be safe bet.

The match

A drew peg 4 on canal, which was reasonably  area so Pete Caton told me, and suggested that I fished long and worm all day and not to feed too much.  Feed it via fruit juice bottle top, or you could use the smallest Fox toss pot for dripping the smallest amount of bait.  I was told that I would catch a mixture of F1’s and carp, and they would be up to 3lb.

So I decided to set up a mountain of gear to use that I cover all options.  I set up 6 rigs for long, 2 with 0.112 vespro line and 4 with 0.136.  All these rigs with straight through to yellow 2.1 bi core with a pulla kit.  The figs were a little heavier than normally as the wind was so strong and you don’t want the rig ripping through, as these fish won’t eat your hook bait, so had 0.1 gram at 10 iches deep, then the others were 0.2, 0.3, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.4.  Also set up paste rigs for down the edges, where I will feed pellet to my left and meat to my right.  The far bank had no cover at all and the nearside was reasonable thick with reeds that looked attractive.

Worms, ensure that you wash your worms really well, I like to wash all the soil out and cut them right up so that they are almost like liquid.  I would add a few gains of corn and half pint of caster to a kilo of worm, this will help bulk it out.  If you were fishing for carp then I wouldn’t cut the worms too fine, and also would add micro pellet to it, as well as caster.  Carp will eat a lot of bait at times, whereas F1’s seem to be less greedy.

The match went well, the ironic thing was……………. i should of feed more bait.  I ended up feeding 1pt of micro, 2 pints of caster and 1 1/4 kilo of worms all via a toss pot.   Also fed a Drennan big pot of worms as soon as I started catching small fish, like skimmers, rudd, goldfish and even the barbel!  As this brought back the carp and F1′s.  Normally feeding like this is a killer on this venue!  Lessons learned!

see video (sorry about my bum…………….  I think this is why Sky ran away from me)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxC8dpElVgU