“After lockdown I was ready for a match that lasted six weeks”
LIKE so many other anglers across the country, I missed the buzz of competitive fishing intensely over lockdown. It got to the point where the next club meeting was in danger of becoming the most overhyped event in sporting history.
Sure, you can prepare a hundred rigs or organise your kit to an obsessive level, but those activities are no substitute for actual matchfishing. In fact, they only intensify your longing to take part again.
So what of that magical return date itself? If anything, the weeks of anticipation meant that I was ridiculously over-prepared. Never mind a six-hour match, after lockdown I was ready for one that lasted six weeks. There are probably military dictatorships with less stringent planning.
I’d half expected fewer anglers to venture out as we assembled in a friendly yet distanced group at Avalon Fishery, but our numbers had actually swelled well beyond the normal two dozen or so.
The one conspicuous difference from the outset, though, was the lack of the usual crowd around the match organiser. I don’t enjoy the human traffic of the draw at the best of times, so I actually preferred just one guy drawing all the pegs. Even though he chose me a bit of a stinker on this occasion!
Sandwiched between two anglers who each had the point of an island to aim at, I felt a bit cut off. I would have a tricky task to match them, but after such a long layoff I was determined to enjoy giving it a good crack.
In all honesty, my downfall began well before the all in whistle, as I assembled way too many rigs. It’s been a bad habit in the past, but months of lockdown had sent the planning part of my brain into overdrive.
With my neighbours quickly hitting fish off the corners of the island, I couldn’t buy a bite on the feeder for the first hour, so I began to experiment. I could find the odd skimmer on a shorter cast with lighter tackle, but in spite of the excitement of these fish leaping like trout (why on earth do they do that?) I badly needed carp.
When I finally managed some fish to the island, I really should have stuck like glue to that tactic, sitting on my hands. Instead I swapped from margins to pellet waggler to bomb and never really got going on any of them. Plans C, D and E never worked and alas, my excess preparation was my undoing.
Could I have challenged the top spots from a mediocre peg in any case? It’s doubtful, but my scattergun approach cost several league points.
A valuable lesson, perhaps, but I’ll need to up my game to qualify for our end-of-season Cup Final. I have enough rigs for two seasons at least, but the moral of the story is: “Keep it simple, stupid!”
“Hooked skimmers leap like trout – why on earth do they do that?”