DANNY’S MATCH AT THE PEG

I WAS on A section at Hinstock Wood, a steady peg but there were cables going across the canal two pegs to my right and they were expected to dominate. I was in the right area, but not quite the right peg.

I spoke to Simon Mottram, who knows the canal well, and he said if I didn’t do anything daft and kept picking fish off, I’d do well. That made me fish three lines – squatt, pinkie and groundbait at 11m, worm down the middle and then hemp at 14m.

Kicking off on worm

To see if a big fish was about early on, I started on worm down the middle in the deep water, feeding chopped worm and caster and using a piece of dendra on the hook. I got what I was looking for with a 1lb perch. That was my lot there, but I had an eye on catching there in the last hour.

My next move was the squatt line at 11m. I’d put in two balls of groundbait and then dripped in squatts with the catapult and kept something going in the net here – only small roach and gudgeon, but enough to keep things on track while I was priming my hemp and worm lines for a look later on.

Trying the hemp

With around two hours to go, I took a look on the hemp line that I’d been loose-feeding from the start and this was okay. I had around 30 roach on the seed, of a reasonable size too, but I was hoping the worm line would come good in the last hour when the boat traffic had died down a little.

There was around half-an-hour to go when I got a bite on the worm and it was a 1lb 8oz skimmer, the fish I was after. It wasn’t on its own either and two more followed pretty quickly to take me to 10-11-0 at the scales, enough to win the whole section.