deciderdly hard

with me and the carps club booking cider farm for a match, and with both lots only getting 10 anglers we decided to join forces and have one match.

i drew 28 and after a quick look at recent results i could see no mention of peg 28, great, but then again every day is different , and the peg did look ok with a gap between islands , and one of the few pegs where you could fish tight to the island, but it turned out to be to shallow , rigs today , 4x14 rigs one for in the gap for pellet and one for corn down the left by the reeds, and a 4x12 rig to fish pellet across at 13 mtrs to some proper reeds not those crappy big norfolk snag pits. and a 4x10 rig to fish tight to the island, but as i said it was to shallow(12 inches)cos the water was quite clear after the weekends frost and last nights rain, and i did try it a couple of times during the match but never had any indications so i wont mention it again.
at the start i cupped in some 4mm at 13 mtrs in the gap some by the reeds and threw some pellets and corn at 3mtrs to my left margin, starting in the gap with 6 and 8mm pellet on the hook , i never had abite in the first 45 mins so i went to the far bank reeds and at least i had movement , and after a bit of adjustment to the depth the first carp was on its way.
2 hours in and i had 8 carp in the net, 5 across and 3 down the edge but again no bites,it was about now that mark walked round and said it was fishing very hard and that dave roper on 25 had 8 fish and that was about the best he had heard of , so i was still well in the race.
with 2 hours to go i reckon i had 15 fish in the net, and i was really struggling for a bite anywhere, so i put in about 50 grains of corn in the channel between the islands and started to feed more with the catapult towards the reeds, and it seemed to have the desired effect as i began to catch fish on corn and also the reeds to my left also started to show signs of life, trouble is you never really know as to whether it was down to the increased feed or just time of day that has made them have a go , but by swapping bertwwen my left margin , the channel and the far bank reeds i probably had 15 fish in the last 90 minutes.
by the time the scales got to me top weight was dave roper on 25 with 47.3, i was next to weigh and put 63.9 on the scales and as it turned out was enough to win with steve kedge coming second just 1 fish behind with60.3 on peg 36
3rd dave roper 47.3
4th ed wynne 45.5 peg58
5th mike owens 44.9 peg 41
6th phil(fabio)harding 42.8(he said he cant wait to get back to the river for some proper fishing)
silvers were won by martin alexander with 6.3 on peg 46
it was definately a day for rotating around your swims as it was a real struggle to get more than a couple of bites in each place. what was stange was the fact that 8mm hard pellets seemed to be best on the hook. more so when you are fishing close to snags as you can tell by the float when your bait is sat just on bottom.