avalon practice match

with rnd 5 of the float only league next sunday there was a practice match this week. with 26 booked in and with 1 to 40 pegs being used we all had a bit of room. dean drew for me and handed me 12, great, same peg as last time and it is turning into one of those pegs you seem to draw on a regular basis , cos i had it last week aswell. two wag rods today ,one up and one down, and 3 pole rigs ,one for pellet shallow (never used)pellet on the deck and a paste rig(christ i will be buying a new lead rod at this rate).for company i had roger andoniou on 13 and glen welch on 11, and opposite i had to look at vic bush who has now bacome a method chucker, i can remember him being a fine exponent of float fishing but the years must be catching up with him as he seems to spend a lot of his time on the feeder now.
at the start i cupped in half a pot of 6,s at 16 mtrs and began firing 8,s to the island, it took 5 mins to get my first carp on banded 8 mill, then i had a run of skimmers on the pellet plus i lost a couple of foulers, so an hour in it was out wth the paste rig and a carp took it on the drop, i had 5 in the next hour before it went a bit quite , so i put in half a pot of 6,s and had a look on the shallow wag. it took about 15 mins to get a carp on that ,i kept altering the depth but the fish didnt really seem to interestd in that ,so it was back on the paste ,i did try the pellet from time to time but all i had to show were a few scales ,so it was a paste day then, i did end up catching 5 on the wag ,but the pole and paste was far more productive, i would like to say that the paste rig was vey technical but you cant say to much about a float 2 number 8,s and a big hook on the end i think the best way to describe it is float ledgering cos all you can do is drop it in and wait, but i got to say it is very effective, even phil groves of carpenters arms 2000 gets results on it so it cant be rocket science.at the end i had 18 carp and afew skimmers which was looking ok that was until gary wall owned up to about 165 lb. and he wasnt to far out as his net went 165.10for a comfortable win , all his fish falling to paste fished at 14 mtrs on peg 30
2nd was me with 117.11
3rd vic bush with 86.2 on peg 38 half on thje feeder and half on the poile and paste
4th mike west 80.13 on peg 29
5th phil harding 79.3 peg 5
6th les (chub)williams 75.5 peg 40
silver went to chris derrick on 16 with 15.6 of roach shallow on caster at 13 mtrs