Hillview Lakes – 19/9/2009

17 fishing

After 2 weeks of decent turn outs it was back to a sensible number for today’s match. As the days push on I feel that the place will become more iffy, which I mean I know what pegs will win you the match and what pegs won’t whereas lately its been anywhere. This was definitely the case today as I pulled out peg 3 and wasn’t looking forward to it at all. Neville who had also been doing well was on 14, I knew also that he wouldn’t win from there.

Getting to my peg it was flat calm, and after walking around to see my dad on 9, there were lots of fish moving on the top all over the lake except my end. I decided I was going to fish shallow and down the margin, after having a good weight shallow last week.

Rigs were simple, 2 Hillbilly Grizzlys on 0.16 to a 0.14 hooklenth incorporating a hair rigged band on both, a 16 B911 on one of them and a size 14 Animal on the other. Both were about 1 foot deep with 2 foot of line above. These rigs were on Middy Pink 14-16 elastic set soft. My final rig was a 0.2 Hillbilly Grizzly again for down the edge on 0.18 to a 0.16 hook length and a number 3 Tubertini 175 hook. This rig was with double 10 elastic. Bait wise I had 3 pints of 4mm pellets, a bit of meat and some 6mm hard pellets (white sensas and fishery own).

At the all in I pinged pellet at 11m for 5 minutes before I even put a rig in, there didn’t seem to be signs of fish anywhere in front of me but I could see them swirling in the fancied pegs. Fordy would be difficult to beat today on peg 18 also Terry King on end peg 39. After feeding my margin I put a white pellet on and set my rig about 18 inches and slapped it in.. I literally never even had a movement on my float for at least 45 minutes, even after trying various depths and baits. I had also gone to 16m to see if the fish were further out to no avail. Its something I don’t like doing but I was left to try my margin, going down I only had little knocks on the float, eventually it buried and I had my first fish in the net.. Even though it was about 1lb and hooked in the arse! After that fish no more bites were forthcoming either side.

Back shallow and I had now made a longer rig up to flick it past my pole tip hopefully to fool some cruising fish; I hooked 2 in the next 2 hours and lost them both. I was getting very annoyed as the fish just weren’t here in any numbers. Gerry on peg 5 had snook a couple of big fish down the edge, one about 14lb hooked in the bum! It really wasn’t my day. I was sure that the bright sun and lack of ripple had affected my peg.

When the sun finally dropped for an hour and the ripple got up I absolutely sacked up having a fish every drop for an hour until it come back out again and I was then left biteless again. It was a very tough match.

I ended up weighing in 44lb with 117lb winning from fancied peg 36.