Winning tricks
One of Britain’s most famous match fisheries is retruning to its best...
from Alex Bates
MANY historic match fishing venues have disappeared off the map down the years – think of Coombe Abbey, Holme Pierrepont and the wide River Welland.
Norfolk’s Middle Level Drain is one such fishery that up until recently would have been on that list too.
A stamping ground of the great and the good in the 1970s and 1980s, this large drain cutting through the heart of the Fens fell from grace and was only lightly fished by predator and pleasure anglers, with the odd club contest. All that is set to change thanks to King’s Lynn AA.
The club controls miles of bank and is striving to get anglers back on to the ‘Level’. Members have worked to improve access so anglers can even drive along the bank and park behind their pegs. Swims have been cut out through head-high reeds and banks levelled to sit on.
That, with a healthy natural stock of fish, adds up to a fine fishery that slowly but surely is seeing matchmen return. There’s even talk of the drain hosting a National or a smaller international event, as the Middle Level ticks every box in terms of what’s required for fishing of this type.
Local matchman Alex Bates is running a feeder-only series across Fenland waters in the coming weeks, and the Middle Level is hosting one round. The series sits alongside the King of the Fens that has produced solid weights so far, and Alex was only too keen to show what the drain had to offer.
“The Middle Level is famed for its bream on the feeder. They’re still there, but anglers who fish the tip would be missing out on thousands of small fish that you can catch on the pole,” Alex said.
“There are lots of roach, rudd, hybrids, skimmers and some big perch and tench to catch on worms, but to win you need a net of bream. If you land on them and fish it right, you can have a massive weight.”
Alex pitched up on the stretch below Magdalen Bridge, near the village of Tilney St Lawrence, to put his feeder attack into action. The red-hot weather had given way to cooler conditions, with waves rolling down the exposed drain – perfect for bream!
CASTING DISTANCE
“The shelf on the Middle Level is very narrow and normally weedy, so there’s no point landing your feeder here – the bream want to be in the deeper water anyway, so you need to come away,” said Alex.
“On this drain, the depth drops away very sharply from a few feet to 15ft in the space of a few metres because of the way it was dug out years ago.
“The Middle Level basically has the contours of a pie dish, so I cast across, count down until I find the top of the shelf and work from there.
OPENING FEED
“The bream here are wild and not fished for that much. They roam about, so you need to give them enough feed to stop them in their tracks.
“To open I’ll give them eight of the large Guru Distance Feeders full of groundbait and particles. This is effectively a baiting-up feeder and gets a lot of stuff down in one go. Into the groundbait I pack dead maggots, corn, finely-chopped worms and, sometimes, casters too.
“Casters are normally high on the list of bream anglers but here they don’t always seem to work, so although I bring them with me I won’t start off feeding them.
“The worms are very finely chopped, almost into a mush, so they will give off the maximum in terms of attraction.
“This makes for very fine particles that the bream have to grub around for.”
CASTING REGULARITY
“The Middle Level is full of small skimmers and hybrids, and even if I wasn’t catching bream, I’d expect these in the opening hour of a match. With regular casting, even if I missed a bite I’d still be putting that cloud and feed into the peg.
When bites tail off it makes sense to leave the rig out for longer, but not more than 10 minutes.”
FANCY A CHASER?
“They say ‘don’t move the feeder’ but that’s not strictly true here. I catch lots of fish by moving feeder and hookbait back through the feed on the bottom.
“If a bream will follow a bait down as it falls, it should follow one as it moves a few inches along the bottom. To achieve this, I pull the braid above the reel to tug the tip round and drag the feeder only 6ins or so.
“I then tighten back up, and often the tip will keep going round as a bream grabs the bait!”