woodlands lake at chilton trinity

i think the cold weather and some work commitments kept a few away today as we only had 10 turn up, fobio and me stopped for brekkie at the gut buster caravan in bridgawter for a change and to be honest it wasnt to bad ,except the caravan was freezing as it had no heating but the food was tasty.
back to the draw and with only a small number here i managed to give everyone a bit of shelter from the biting north easterly wind, i was half expecting some ice so i had the breaker with me but the lake was free of the hard stuff, so that was good.
i let fishery boss ,misha herring draw for me and she handed me peg 7 which is the 2nd peg up on the far side, i had john bradford on 6 for company and tom mangnal on 9.
only 2 rigs today, a 4x12 on ,14 with a middy 8313 size hook on .14 for the margins as i had 3 foot but as i only had a small fish bite on it after several attempts during the match so i wont waste my finger tips by mentioning it again.
the other rig was .75g slim float with a 6313 size 18 on .10 for out in front and after a bit of plumbing around i managed to find areas at 6 13 and 16 mtrs with almost the same depth so i didnt have to mess around with the depth at all. at the start i fed casters at 6 mtrs and a mixture of micro,s dead mags and a few pieces of corn at 13 and 16 starting at 13 mtrs it took me 30 mins to get a bite and that was a small roach which dropped off ,and by now fabio on peg 11 had 2 carp at 13 mtrs , ed wynne on 10 had 1 as did tom on 9 but he was fishing the method with corn on the hook, after 2 hours i was well behind with fabio having 4 carp ed having the same and tom getting fish aswell, last match here the corn was the killer bait but all i had on it today was a good skimmer and a smallish tench so the corn was binned and it was onto the dead mag and by feeding some micro,s and dead mags after each couple of bites i began to catch small roach and more importantly odd carp were starting to show , by now fabio was still stuck on 4 carp as was ed but he did manager a couple more towards the end plus some silvers, unfortunately fabio didnt manage to land anymore although he did lose a couple in the last hour, it seemed as though the fish were happiest sat in the middle of the lake today as fabio had 4 on peg 11 ed had 6 on peg 10 tom on peg 9 ended up with 10, 9 on the method and 1 on the wag(he had to get at least one properly)and i had 7 .
as expected tom mangnal won with his 10 carp and 1 roach going 42.2
2nd was me with 7 carp for 32.4 and 6.15 of silvers for a total of 39.3 , did lose 1 fouler at the end which would have swung it for me but it was the only one i lost so i cant complain
3rd ed wynne 34lb peg 10
4th phil(fabio)harding 27.1
5th tom thick with the top silvers weight 9lb
6th nigel bartlett and second in silvers 7.5
ive got to say that this was the first match i have fished at this venue where the method feeder has won on the day, but at least tom was cheerful with it as he was coming under a lot of abuse during the day, we will probably be down there again in a fortnight but we may fish the small (ash) lake for a change which seems to have a lot of small fish in with an odd bigger surprise