Far Bank Monsoon-style matches...
Sooner or later, most competition anglers must face extreme conditions. For Dom Garnett, it was a case of sink or swim at Upper Tamar Lake
AS I write this week’s tale of woe, my kit is still dripping wet from one of the most gruesome days on the bank I’ve ever endured.
Okay, so nobody forced me to fish. I knew the forecast. On the one hand, my wife pondered if I was mad and suggested Sunday indoors – but on the other, there were league points up for grabs and the chance to fish a top venue.
Forty odd (some of them very odd) anglers showed up on the day, across two matches. Hopes for decent weights were high, but it was to be a session to forever dispel the very British saying that there is ‘no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing’. Try saying that when half your maggots are abseiling up and down your seatbox and you resemble a human teabag.
Despite the relentless downpour, though, it fished pretty well. From the first whistle, it took mere seconds to get a bite from a small perch. I must have had 60 more in the first hour on the
whip, a repetitive pleasure that temporarily made me forget the weather.
My classic mistake was to look at another tactic. Having baited a feeder line from the off, I fancied there must be something bigger than one-ounce perch in the grey beyond. The feeder had only just settled when the tip went round. A half-pound skimmer persuaded me to keep going.
This was a big mistake as it turned out, because while I prayed for bream, others were still racking up cricket scores of fish on the whip line. And with brutal winds now joining heavy rain, it wasn’t easy to fish accurately at four metres, let alone 30.
Back on the whip again, the fish were still there at least. A bottomless supply of small perch. My next mistake was waiting too long to switch to a new hook, as I suspected that the bony-mouthed little blighters had dulled the edge of the one I started on.
By the latter stages of play I half expected to see a bloke with a beard rounding up animals in pairs. My groundbait had become slop, I was wet to the skin and my wellies were half full of water. Like the rain, however, the bites didn’t let up.
A late run of roach saw me finish well, but that hour messing with the feeder had cost me, and my 20lb of whip fish were only enough for fourth overall. Bruce Hunt won outright with an insane 44lb of mostly whip-caught perch! It was still chucking it down as I drove slowly home, the car windows misting up with damp.